The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament. - Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.. - Marx, The Holy Family, Chapter 6 (1846)

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. - Marx, German Ideology (1845)

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)

all past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange. - Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877)

The bureaucrat has the world as a mere object of his action. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)

No natural science can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground. In order to hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist. - Lenin, The Significance of Militant Materialism (1922)

Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle. - Marx, Wages of Labour (1844)

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.... - Engels, Principles of Communism (1847)

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

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. - Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, “Dogmatism And ‘Freedom of Criticism’” (1902)

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

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. - Marx, Preface to First German Edition of Capital (1867)

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first Chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!! - Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Logic (1914)

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, Theses On Feuerbach: Thesis 11 (1845)

But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on. - Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, “Paragraph One of the Rules” (1904)

The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom. - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)

The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form - Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3 (1867)

The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation - Marx, Comment on James Mill (1844)

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite! - Marx