Karl Marx Quotes

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

Karl Marx
There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

Karl Marx
Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?

Karl Marx
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.

Karl Marx
Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.

Karl Marx
The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

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

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

Karl Marx
The English Established Church... will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income.

Karl Marx
There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain.

Karl Marx
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

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

Karl Marx
A house sold by A to B does not wander from one place to another, although it circulates as a commodity.

Karl Marx
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the race of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

Karl Marx
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