Religion is the opiate of the people" is one of the most frequently quoted statements of Karl Marx. It was translated from the German original, "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes" and is often referred to as "religion is the opiate of the masses." The quote originates from the introduction of his 1843 work Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right which was subsequently released one year later in Marx's own journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a collaboration with Arnold Ruge. The phrase "Tis opium you feed your people" appears in 1797 in Marquis de Sade's text L'Histoire de Juliette. In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley states that opium is the religion of the people (or rather, soma).
The quote, in context, reads as follows (emphasis added):
Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sig ...