2.
“Revolutions
are the locomotives of history.”
3.
“The last
capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
4.
“Surround
yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help
you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth
keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.”
5.
““The
foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not
make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man
who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself
again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the
world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion,
which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted
world...
Religious
suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a
protest against real suffering. 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.
The abolition
of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their
real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their
condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale
of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has
plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue
to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw
off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion
disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a
man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will
move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun
which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”
6.
“Reason has
always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.”
7.
“Last words
are for fools who haven’t said enough.”
8.
“Labor in the
white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.”
9.
“The increase in value of the world of things is
directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.”
10.
“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.”
11.
“Necessity is blind until it becomes
conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.”
12.
“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.”
13.
“The first requisite for the happiness of the
people is the abolition of religion.”
14.
“Private property has made us so stupid and
one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us
as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited,
etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again
conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life,
and the life, which they serve as, means is the life of private property –
labour and conversion into capital.
In the place
of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer
estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to
be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner
wealth to the outer world.
The abolition
of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses
and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and
attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become
a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object
made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their
practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the
thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to
man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical
nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.”
15.
“Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like,
lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it
sucks.”
16.
“The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that
from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their
capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore
the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society.”
17.
“Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois
State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker,
and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”
18.
“The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a
world to win.”
19.
“You must be aware that the reward for labour,
and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.”
20.
“Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers
on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without
fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the
living flower.”
