Karl Marx Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Karl Marx
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
Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.

Karl Marx
And as for the Jews, who since the emancipation of their sect have everywhere put themselves, at least in the person of their eminent representatives, at the head of the counter-revolution — what awaits them?

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
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.

Karl Marx
We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market, it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin.

Karl Marx
If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

Karl Marx
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.

Karl Marx
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

Karl Marx
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has, historically, played a most revolutionary role.

Karl Marx
All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.

Karl Marx
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Karl Marx
Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

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

Karl Marx
Something that is merely negative creates nothing.

Karl Marx
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Karl Marx
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Karl Marx
The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.

Karl Marx
The task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of today's practice of life, the summit of which is the money system.

Karl Marx
Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.

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
What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

Karl Marx
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

Karl Marx