Karl Marx Quotes

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

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

Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.

What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.

As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.

No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind

Capital is dead labor that vampirelike lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it suck.

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

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

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.

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

By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.

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

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

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.

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps

He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.

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

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Religion is the opiate of the people.

Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

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

Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.

The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.

Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.

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

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

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.

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

All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Religion is the opium of the people.

In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

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

As individuals express their life, so they are.

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them