Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

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

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps

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

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.