Karl Marx

We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

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.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

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.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.