Quotes by Karl Marx

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
– Karl Marx
A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
– Karl Marx
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
– Karl Marx
All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.
– Karl Marx
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
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
– Karl Marx
Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
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
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.
– Karl Marx
Democracy is the road to socialism.
– Karl Marx
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
– Karl Marx
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
– Karl Marx
Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.
– Karl Marx
I am not a Marxist.
– Karl Marx
In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
– Karl Marx
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
– Karl Marx
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
– Karl Marx
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
– Karl Marx
Religion is the opium of the masses.
– Karl Marx
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
– Karl Marx
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
– Karl Marx
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
The burgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
– Karl Marx
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
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
– Karl Marx
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
– Karl Marx
The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy, world domination, is a fixed star.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
– Karl Marx
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
– Karl Marx
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
– Karl Marx
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
– Karl Marx
We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.
– Karl Marx
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
– Karl Marx
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
– Karl Marx
Religion is the opiate of the masses.
– Karl Marx
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
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
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
– Karl Marx
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
– Karl Marx
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
– Karl Marx
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
– Karl Marx
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.
– Karl Marx
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
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
– Karl Marx
History does nothing it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
– Karl Marx
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
– Karl Marx
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
– Karl Marx
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
– Karl Marx