Karl Marx Quotes (97 Quotes)

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

The dictatorship of the proletariet.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

Religion... is the opium of the people.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

Religion is the sign of the oppressed... It is the opium of the people.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world the thing, however, is to change it.

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.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.

The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that ... each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity.

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past.

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

When we bought this house, we designated this room the library,

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.