Nobody — not even “a musician of the future” — can live upon future products.

Atheism” ... reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man. Marx, Letter to 30 November 1842

Ignorance never yet helped anybody.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.

The best thing for rich people to do is become Batman

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

If you love without evoking love in return - if through the vital expression of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune.

Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state

Moments are the elements of profit

The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.

Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.