Karl Marx Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.

Karl Marx
The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.

Karl Marx
The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.

Karl Marx
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
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.

Karl Marx
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.

Karl Marx
The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

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

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
If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one's back on hum suffering and look after one's own skin.

Karl Marx
Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.

Karl Marx
Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

Karl Marx
The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.

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

Karl Marx
All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

Karl Marx
The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.

Karl Marx
In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.

Karl Marx
Be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.

Karl Marx
In the bureaucracy, the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.

Karl Marx
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.

Karl Marx
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Karl Marx
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.

Karl Marx
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.

Karl Marx
By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.

Karl Marx
By the aristocracy of finance must here be understood not merely the great loan promoters and speculators in public funds, in regard to whom it is immediately obvious that their interests coincide with the interests of the state power. All modern finance, the whole of the banking business, is interwoven in the closest fashion with public credit.

Karl Marx
All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy

Karl Marx
The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Karl Marx
One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.

Karl Marx
The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.

Karl Marx
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.

Karl Marx