Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I'll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.