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The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
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Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
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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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History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
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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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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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The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.
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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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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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All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
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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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The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.
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Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
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In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
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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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The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
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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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Every commodity is compelled to chose some other commodity for its equivalent.
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So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.
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Bourgeois society continuously brings forth the Jew from its own entrails.
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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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The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
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From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.