Karl Marx famous quotes

Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
-- Karl Marx

#Class #Oppression #Form

Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
-- Karl Marx

#Technology #Class #House

Follow your own path, no matter what people say.
-- Karl Marx

#Self #People #Matter

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery
-- Karl Marx

#Rotten #Misery #Wealth

Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
-- Karl Marx

#Laughing #People #Care

An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.
-- Karl Marx

#Mean #Increase #Labour

Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.
-- Karl Marx

#Mean #Long #Coins

The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.
-- Karl Marx

#Unity #Bourgeoisie #Proletariat

These numerous points at which money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated in numerous individual hoards or potential money-capitals appears as so many obstacles to circulation, because they immobilise the money and deprive it of its capacity to circulate for a certain time.
-- Karl Marx

#Obstacles #Individual #Capacity

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.
-- Karl Marx

#Simple #Gold #Commodity

Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.
-- Karl Marx

#Men #Self #Essence

If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.
-- Karl Marx

#Mean #Needs #Hours

The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
-- Karl Marx

#Struggle #Class #World

Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
-- Karl Marx

#Tasks #Matter #Projects

...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.
-- Karl Marx

#Communication #Winning #Class

Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.
-- Karl Marx

#Doe #States #Arise

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.
-- Karl Marx

#Self #Return #Moments

Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.
-- Karl Marx

#House #Construction #Process

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.
-- Karl Marx

#Paper #Might #Paradoxical

Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.
-- Karl Marx

#Country #Hands #Titles

The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.
-- Karl Marx

#Style #Rifles #Citizens

The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.
-- Karl Marx

#Circles #Understanding #Details

The world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs.
-- Karl Marx

#Spring #People #Sound

Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)
-- Karl Marx

#July #Practice #Connections

Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital , in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit .
-- Karl Marx

#Expression #Credit #Usury

The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
-- Karl Marx

#Past #History #Brain

A nation which enslaves another forges its own chains.
-- Karl Marx

#Tyrants #Chains #Tyranny

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.
-- Karl Marx

#Crush #Individual #Abstract

The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value .
-- Karl Marx

#Realizing #Circulation #Labour

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.
-- Karl Marx

#White #Long #Black

There are no circumstances imaginable, not even victory, under which the proletariat should give up its possession of arms.
-- Karl Marx

#Giving Up #Victory #Arms

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

#Business #Opportunity #Men

A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.
-- Karl Marx

#Income #Development #Progressive

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.
-- Karl Marx

#Change #Courage #Peace

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
-- Karl Marx

#Hands #Nine #Majority

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
-- Karl Marx

#Ghouls #Vampire #Politics

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

#Philosophical #Dignity #Reason

There comes a time in your life when you have to let go of all the pointless drama and the people who create it and surround yourself with people who make you laugh so hard that you forget the bad and focus solely on the good. After all, life is too short to be anything but happy.
-- Karl Marx

#Happiness #Letting Go #Drama

The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.
-- Karl Marx

#Slavery #States #Existence

The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.
-- Karl Marx

#Class #Revolutionary #Working Class

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
-- Karl Marx

#Class #Long #Competition

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
-- Karl Marx

#Atheist #Mind #Deals

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
-- Karl Marx

#Frustrated #Arms #Revolutionary

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.
-- Karl Marx

#Book #Thinking #Dust

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

#Society #Doe #Individual

The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.
-- Karl Marx

#Mind #Unhappy #Facts

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
-- Karl Marx

#Inspirational #Philosophical #Political

Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.
-- Karl Marx

#Gold #Silver #Gold And Silver

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!
-- Karl Marx

#Country #Communication #Winning

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.
-- Karl Marx

#Sex #Progress #Upheaval

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
-- Karl Marx

#Strength #Depression #Pain

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
-- Karl Marx

#Change #Lying #Political

Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, i.e, of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.
-- Karl Marx

#Mother #Father #Use

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. 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

#Class #Individual #Antagonism

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
-- Karl Marx

#Funny #Sarcastic #Philosophy

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

#Humility #Self #Quality

What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.
-- Karl Marx

#Work #Men #Law

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.
-- Karl Marx

#Mother #Children #Care

I do not like money, money is the reason we fight.
-- Karl Marx

#Money #Fighting #Reason

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
-- Karl Marx

#Men #Evil #Alienation

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

#Philosophical #People #Atheism

If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.
-- Karl Marx

#Cutting #People #Liberty

My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.
-- Karl Marx

#America #Life Is #Capitalism

There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
-- Karl Marx

#Liberty #Way #Taxes

Religion is the opium of the masses.
-- Karl Marx

#Atheist #Fear #Religion

Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.
-- Karl Marx

#Men #Ideas #Christ

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
-- Karl Marx

#Independent #Individuality #Individualism

The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.
-- Karl Marx

#Tasks #World

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew -- not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. ... What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man -- and turns them into commodities. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
-- Karl Marx

#Real #Jealous #Men

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
-- Karl Marx

#Machines #May #Weapons

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

#Philosophy #Greek #Tragedy

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
-- Karl Marx

#Philosophical #Utility #Values

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
-- Karl Marx

#Philosophical #Inspiration #Revolution

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

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Political

If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.
-- Karl Marx

#Selfish #Sacrifice #People

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
-- Karl Marx

#World #Economics #Nothing To Lose

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
-- Karl Marx

#Philosophical #Europe #Haunting

Democracy is the road to socialism.
-- Karl Marx

#Historical #Democracy #Liberty

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

#Country #Shows

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, , etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.
-- Karl Marx

#Past #Government #Historical

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
-- Karl Marx

#Animal #Political #Totems

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
-- Karl Marx

#Certain #Marxist

Last words are for those fools who believe they have not yet said enough...
-- Karl Marx

#Believe #Lasts #Fool

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
-- Karl Marx

#Competition #Together #Doe

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
-- Karl Marx

#Nature #Law #Different

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
-- Karl Marx

#Freedom #Philosophical #Consciousness

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
-- Karl Marx

#Philosophical #Historical #Politics

Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation.
-- Karl Marx

#Moving #Voice #Government

Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.
-- Karl Marx

#Wine #Doe #Be Careful

Parrots are the opium of the people
-- Karl Marx

#People #Parrots #Opium

Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.
-- Karl Marx

#Men #Alive #Landscape

It's possible that I shall make an ***** of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.
-- Karl Marx

#Littles #Way #Ass

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.
-- Karl Marx

#Writing #Mean #Order

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained.
-- Karl Marx

#Book #Struggle #Blow

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

#Sex #Philosophical #Progress

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 encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
-- Karl Marx

#Men #Past #Brain

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
-- Karl Marx

#Fall #Victory #Bourgeoisie

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
-- Karl Marx

#Men #Consciousness #Social

They don't know it, but they are doing it.
-- Karl Marx

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

#Birthday #Class #Ideas