Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.

The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.

The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.

Under private property, each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.

The rule of the bourgeois democrats [in pre-federal Germany], from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction

The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.

Work is external to the worker. . . . It is not part of his nature; consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself. . . . The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless.