“The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.”
– Karl Marx

‘A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.'
- Adam Smith

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

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
– Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part II On the Expence of Justice

“Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”
― Karl Marx

‘What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.’
- Wealth of Nations

"All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons."
- Wealth of Nation, Adam Smith

" It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
- Wealth of Nations

"The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public."
- Wealth of Nations

" People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
- Wealth of Nations

‘The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.’
- Adam Smith

"Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security."
- Wealth of Nation; V.ii.2

“The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
– Adam Smith, Book V, Chapter II, Article I: Taxes upon the Rent of House

‘It must always be remembered, however, that it is the luxuries and not the necessary expense of the inferior ranks of people, that ought ever to be taxed.’
- Adam Smith

"A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism."
- Karl Marx

‘The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ….As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to ‘remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'‘
- Adam Smtih

‘The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.’
- Adam Smith

“Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world of its proper value.”
- Karl Marx

‘All money is a matter of belief.’
- Adam Smith

‘Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.’
- Adam Smith

“You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.”
― Karl Marx

‘The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.’
- Adam Smith

"Since labor is the source of all wealth, no one in society can appropriate wealth except as the product of labor."
- Karl Marx

"The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate."
- Adam Smith

“Monopoly is the inevitable end of competition, which engenders it by a continual negation of itself."
- Karl Marx

‘In raising the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates in the same manner as simple interest does in the accumulation of debt. Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and thereby lessening the sale of their goods, both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits; they are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.’
-Adam Smith

‘The rate of profit… is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.’
- Adam Smith