On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its "great intellects.""

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

"All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force."

"The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money."

"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."