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The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
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Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
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Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
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Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
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The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
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History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
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The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
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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.
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The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
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In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.
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The labour-power is a commodity, not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.
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Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
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Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.
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History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
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From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
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If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.
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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.
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When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.
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The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
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Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.
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Der Philosoph legt sich – also selbst eine abstrakte Gestalt des entfremdeten Menschen – als den Maßstab der entfremdeten Welt an.
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The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
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(That is it!)
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The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.