Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter VI, Marx, p. 295
“Marx sees Epicurus as a destroyer of the Greek myths and as a philosopher bringing to light the break-up of a tribal community. His system destroyed the visible heaven of the ancients as a keystone of political and religious life. Marx allies himself, so to speak, with Epicurean atheism, which he regards at this stage as a challenge by the intellectual é lite to the cohorts of common sense. ‘ As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: "Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd."’”
Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 102-3
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Leszek Kolakowski 45
Philosopher, historian of ideas 1927–2009Related quotes

Anarchism or Socialism (1906)
Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VII, The Underworld of Economics, p. 188
Context: The book was called Imperialism; it was a devastating volume. For here was the most important and searing criticism which had ever been levied against the profit system. The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world. He saw the process of imperialism as a relentless and restless tendency of capitalism to rescue itself from a self-imposed dilemma, a tendency that necessarily involved foreign commercial conquest and that thereby inescapably involved a constant risk of war. No more profound moral indictment of capitalism had ever been posed.
Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

trans. Michael Chase, p. 272
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 247-8
The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987), 1. Can Democracy Be Just Anyting?
"The Marxian Critique of Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 244-282