"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

-Groucho Marx

"These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

Constant revolutionizing of production distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices 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, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

"If Milan or Madrid, mainly Italy."

In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is people, real, living, who do all this.

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.

This is largely why Marx is considered such a villain.

What is, that last quote? Since when did lauding those who fight for the common good become the trait of a villain?

Oh, no, the quote is good.

I just meant that the actual record of Marx helping people is pretty grim, compared to the millions dead. Admittedly, his supporters would probably argue that his ideas were not truly implemented, which would be a fair point if true, and so the discussion would turn to that, and to whether his ideas actually can be implemented, or to what degree.

Mostly it was just meant as a joking dig.

The quotes are interesting though. I've enjoyed them (which isn't to say I agree with the bulk).

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

Couldn't agree more with that last one!!

whoa whoa whoa, in America Marx is only occasionally viewed as a villain, but he is widely celebrated in most areas of the world. They love him in South America, and most of Europe would take communism over fascism.

If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.

This is a kind of mutual reconciliation society... Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes. But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence.

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

The representation of private interests ... abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object.

It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle — insofar as its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist Manifesto says, ‘in form’.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor....

The bourgeoisie is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself.

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.

"that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution."

I wouldn't necessarily agree. Science seems to think that we came from a nothingness and sprang into being with the Big Bang, now ever decaying through time with entropy till we reach a universal death where everything burns out and is dispersed, motionless, which would return us to nothingness. That seems circular to me.

But is that perpetually reccurring?

Obviously, Marx was writing long before modern-day discoveries in physics were made, and this has more to do with dialectics vs metaphysics- the evolution of ideas. Perhaps it could be argued that thought goes through a similar process with loss of knowledge as the universe with the big bang and entropy- starting from nothing, growing, but one day dying out for one reason or another in a circular sort of fashion.

To continue on this aside, I always understood the Big Bang as arising not from nothingness, but from oneness – that is to say, from everything in the current universe. As to what may have surrounded this oneness, that is still only conjecture.