The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly, the struggle against
the world whose spiritual aroma is religion .... Religion is the sigh of
oppressed creatures, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of
spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.... The criticism of
religion is thus in embryo a criticism of the veil of tears whose halo is religion.
...woe betide those who seek to save themselves the pain of mental building
by inhabiting dead men's minds.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living, and just when they seem to be revolutionizing themselves
and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to
their service and borrow from the names, battle slogans, and costumes in order
to present the new scene of world history in this time honored disguise and
borrowed language .... The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot
draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.