Workers in the bourgeois countries must fight for equal rights for men and women. -- Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Preface to The Emancipation of Women in Writings of V.I. Lenin (1933)

machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers. -- Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)

Religion is the opium of the masses. -- Karl Marx

It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us. -- Peter Kropotkin

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand. -- Karl Marx

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital. -- Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)

It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake. -- Peter Kropotkin

As far as our own desire is concerned, we do not want to fight even for a single day. However, if circumstances force us to fight, we can fight to the finish. -- "Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong" (August 1946), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 97.

This struggle must be organised, according to "all the rules of the art", by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. -- Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, "The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the Revolutionaries" (1904)

The most important thing is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions. -- Lenin, The Significance of Militant Materialism (1922)

The Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race; they follow pastoral or agricultural occupations only ... With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits. -- Engels, On Afghanistan (1857)

Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, ie of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. -- Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)

Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one's own and that of other people. -- Trotsky, The Struggle for Cultured Speech (1923)

History is the judge - its executioner, the proletarian. -- Marx, Speech at Anniversary of The People's Paper (1856)

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ... -- Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)

The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; only mobilizing the masses and relying on them can wage it. -- "Be Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work" (January 27, 1934), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 147.

Democracy is the road to socialism. -- Karl Marx

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending. -- Marx, Doctoral Thesis, Chapter 1 (1841)

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included). -- Marx, Letter to Kugelmann (1868)

As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. -- Marx, German Ideology (1845)

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international. -- Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, "Dogmatism And 'Freedom of Criticism'" (1904)

Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. -- Peter Kropotkin

In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, ... a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. -- Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. -- Karl Marx

We must give a scientific explanation of society, and clearly explain it to the masses. That is the difference between Marxism and reformism. -- Trotsky, Discussions on the Transitional Program (1938)

Our biggest mistake was that we did not plant the stake in the heart of the vampire: finance. -- Louise Michelle

The urban guerrilla is engaged in revolutionary action for the people, and with them seeks the participation of the people in the struggle against the dictatorship and the liberation of the country. -- Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla (1969)

This army has an indomitable spirit and is determined to vanquish all enemies and never to yield. No matter what the difficulties and hardships, so long as a single man remains, he will fight on. -- "On Coalition Government" (April 24, 1945), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 264.

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. -- Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)

Every individual capital forms, however, but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class. -- Marx, Capital Volume II (1885)

Thousands upon thousands of martyrs have heroically laid down their lives for the people; let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood! -- "On Coalition Government" (April 24, 1945), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 318.

Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. -- Trotsky, Communist Policy Toward Art (1923)

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed. -- Karl Marx

Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy. -- "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art" (May 1942), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 70.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. -- Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)

War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created. -- Lenin, Socialism and War (1915)

Just as the operation of the laws of physiology yields different results in a growing than in a dying organism, so the laws of Marxist economy assert themselves differently in a developing and disintegrating capitalism. -- Trotsky, Marxism in Our Time (1939)

Ultimatism is an attempt to rape the working class after failing to convince it. -- Trotsky, Bureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)

Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion. -- Lord Acton in 'Nationality', in The Home and Foreign Review (July 1862).

All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. -- Marx, published by Engels Capital, Volume III (1894)

When feudalism was overthrown and "free" capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. -- Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)

And as to prices, they will serve the cause of socialism better, the more honestly they begin to express the real economic relations of the present day. -- Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed (1936)

Tremble, oppressors of the world! Not far beyond your purblind sight there dawns the scarlet and sable lights of the Judgment Day. -- Pittsburgh Manifesto

A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. -- Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25 (1867)

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners. -- Mikhail Bakunin

Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. -- "Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Mao Zedong Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy. -- Karl Marx

It is only in revolutionary struggle against the capitalists of every country, and only in union with the working women and men of the whole world, that we will achieve a new and brighter future-the socialist brotherhood of the workers. -- Alexandra Kollontai, Our Tasks (1917)

Capital is money: Capital is commodities. ... Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs. -- Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. -- Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)