Karl Marx Quotes

332 Sourced Quotes

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

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
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
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Karl Marx
As to the Delhi affair, [i. e., the Indian Rebellion of 1857] it seems to me that the English ought to begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season has set in in real earnest. Being obliged for the present to hold the fort for you as the Tribune's military correspondent I have taken it upon myself to put this forward. NB [nota bene; "take note"], on the supposition that the reports to date have been true. It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.

Karl Marx
The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.

Karl Marx
Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.

Karl Marx
The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

Karl Marx
Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.

Karl Marx
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

Karl Marx
The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state

Karl Marx
We see then, commodities are in love with money, but "the course of true love never did run smooth".

Karl Marx
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

Karl Marx
Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. A proof of this is for example, that, because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries with which I was pestered during the existence of the International to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.

Karl Marx
To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

Karl Marx
Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.

Karl Marx
Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

Karl Marx
The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

Karl Marx
Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

Karl Marx
In its beginnings, the credit system sneaks in as a modest helper of accumulation and draws by invisible threads the money resources scattered all over the surface of society into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. But soon it becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.

Karl Marx
The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.

Karl Marx
The entire process seems simple and natural, i. e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.

Karl Marx
Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.

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

Karl Marx