“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. Workers of the world unite!”

— Karl Marx (c.1848) a Ranker (Ѻ) top quote (#4)

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes (bring into reality) a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act.”

— Karl Marx (1867), Capital, §:The Labor-Process: the Production of Use-Values (Ѻ)

“Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.”

“The body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use.”

“Indeed, nowhere in Capital probably does Marx so excel himself in vituperation as in his description of the founder of thermodynamics as ‘an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford) …”

“Marx stands in the same relation to his predecessors in the theory of surplus value that Lavoisier maintains to Priestley and Scheele (Ѻ) … He saw that he had to deal neither with dephlogisticised air, nor with fire-air, but with oxygen.”

— Friedrich Engels (1893) [8]

“Marx considers the movement of society as governed by laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness, and intention of men but instead, and conversely, determine their will, consciousness, and intentions.”

— Anon Russian (1946), review of Capital; note: Richard Brown considers this statement "equally startling" as Freud's "A Project for Scientific Psychology" [1]

“Gassendi, who freed Epicurus from the interdict laid down on him by the fathers of the Church and the whole of the middle ages (see: middle ages genius) — that age of materialized irrationalism. It is more a case of Gassendi learning philosophy from Epicurus than being able to teach us about Epicurus’s philosophy. Gassendi attempt to make Epicurus cohabitate with the church is like throwing the habit of a Christian nun over the exuberant body of the Greek Lais. Philosophy, so long as a drop of blood shall beat in its heart, being absolutely free and master of the universe, will never grow tired of throwing to its adversaries the cry of Epicurus.”

— Karl Marx (1841), “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” [12]

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation (or soul of soulless condition) (Ѻ). It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is require for their real happiness.”

— Karl Marx (1843), posthumously-published paper on Hegel [11]