QUOTES

 It occurred to me after writing last week about quotes of Vladimir Lenin, that I bypassed Karl Marx in the great line of Euro-Asian politicians and statesmen.  His Germany was the world's criminal in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century.  Marx famously wrote The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.   We are in the period from 1835 to 1883.  We get off on the right foot, so to speak, with two lines from a poem he wrote at the age of 19.

"Thus heaven I've forfeited, I know full well.  My soul, once true to God, is chosen for hell."

"It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs.  I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness,  and of our bowing and scraping, dodging and hair-splitting over words."

His favorite saying - De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted]

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people. "

"Man makes religion, religion does not make man."

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.  We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things."

"These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."  

"The theory of Communism can be summed up in a single sentence:  Abolition of private property."

 Wow!