Quote collection
414 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. (Preface to the French edition)."
"The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker."
"The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar."
"There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them."
"Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market."
"Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology."
"As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality."
"The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production."
"Free education for all children in public schools... Combination of education with industrial production"
"The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge."
"Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough. To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity."
"The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour."
"Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science."
"But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation."
"[T]he task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of today's practice of life, the summit of which is the money system."
"In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality."
"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality."
"The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent."
"Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman."
"Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things."