1848

Showing 31 works across all media from 1848

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 9.8

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 9.6

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 8.7

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 8.2

Fiction · Satire

Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray

1848 · 951 pages

Becky Sharp leaves school with no money and claws her way through English society while her friend Amelia wastes her love on a worthless man. Thackeray spares nobody, and Becky is magnificent company.

★ 7.2

Nonfiction · Political manifesto

The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

1848 · 287 pages

A spectre is haunting Europe, Marx and Engels announce, then read all recorded history as class struggle and hand the workers of the world a program. No pamphlet has moved more people.

★ 7.0

Fiction · Epistolary novel

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Bronte

1848 · 576 pages

Helen Graham bolts her bedroom door against a drunk husband, takes her son, and lives by selling paintings. Victorian reviewers called it coarse and unfit to put in a girl's hands.

★ 6.6

Speech

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

1848

★ 5.4

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 4.8

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 4.0

Pamphlet · Political literature · Economic literature

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto · 1848

★ 3.9

Personal journal

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Soren Kierkegaard

1848

★ 3.8

Novel · Coming of age story

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography · 1848

★ 3.7

Speech · Political speech

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.

Abraham Lincoln

1848

★ 3.7

Poem

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.

James Russell Lowell

The Vision of Sir Launful · 1848

★ 3.6

Personal journal

Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1848

★ 3.5

Speech · Political speech

We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and these interests it is our duty to follow.

Henry John Temple

1848

★ 3.5

Poem

I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator God And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.

John Clare

1848

★ 3.5

Essay · Political literature

I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least";... Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all."

Henry David Thoreau

The Relation of the Individual to the State · 1848

★ 2.1

Essay · Political literature

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison... The only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

Henry David Thoreau

The Relation of the Individual to the State · 1848

★ 2.1