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

Ignorance never yet helped anybody.

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

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

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe.

The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.

The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

Self-contempt is a serpent that ever gnaws at one's breath, sucking the life-blood from one's own heart and mixing it with the poison of misanthropy and despair.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion

As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.

Everyone of our relationships with nature and man must be a definite expression of our real, individual life.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps

Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, here dance!

The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present

The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.