Marx on Wikipedia

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit: but they are short lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm and stress period. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts...

—"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 597.

"The Eighteenth Brumaire" drops jaws.