Karl Marx Quotes

332 Sourced Quotes

It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average, that he will wash himself.

Karl Marx
Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

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

Karl Marx
But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

Karl Marx
As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

Karl Marx
We cannot always choose the vocation to which we believe we are called. Our social relations, to some extent, have already begun to form before we are in a position to determine them.

Karl Marx
What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.

Karl Marx
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.

Karl Marx
Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

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
The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.

Karl Marx
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.

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

Karl Marx
Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

Karl Marx
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society [such as communism] which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make [this] Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

Karl Marx
On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital.

Karl Marx
Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

Karl Marx
— man's heart is a wonderful thing, especially when carried in the purse —

Karl Marx
Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds.

Karl Marx
Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth, it buys as long as it has the means to buy.

Karl Marx
Did you not read our articles about the June revolution, and was not the essence of the June revolution the essence of our paper?
Why then your hypocritical phrases, your attempt to find an impossible pretext?
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.

Karl Marx
Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.

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
Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.

Karl Marx
The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.

Karl Marx