Quotes About Society

All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force.

Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women.

Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.

Lorsque le véritable but fut atteint, c'est-à-dire lorsque fut réalisée la transformation bourgeoise de la société anglaise, Locke évinça Habacuc.

We know that to work well the newfangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by newfangled men — and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself. - Speech at anniversary of the People's Paper, April 1856

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. … what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...

La historia de todas las sociedades, hasta nuestros días es la historia de la lucha de las clases. Hombres libres y esclavos, patricios y plebeyos, señores y siervos, maestros y oficiales, en una palabra: opresores y oprimidos se enfrentaron siempre, mantuvieron una lucha constante, velada unas veces y otras franca y abierta, lucha que terminó siempre con la transformación revolucionaria de toda la sociedad o el hundimiento de las clases en pugna.

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

capital collapses because it cannot exist alongside shared knowledge

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity. - Theses On Feuerbach (1845)

The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society. - Theses On Feuerbach (1845)

Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. - Theses On Feuerbach (1845)

Tarihte ne olduysa öyle olmas? gerektiÄŸi, baÅŸka türlü olamayaca?? için öyle olmuÅŸtur

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

The proletariat is the agent of this emancipation because it is the only class whose particular interest is synonymous with he general interests of humanity. And it is charged with this supreme mission precisely because it is the most exploited and hence most dehumanized class in existing society.

It was now painfully clear to the people that equality before the law did not produce genuine, human equality

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured an looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.