Karl Marx Quotes

#1. Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx

#2. From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.

Karl Marx

#3. Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

Karl Marx

#4. The best thing for rich people to do is become Batman

Karl Marx

#5. So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.

Karl Marx

#6. Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.

Karl Marx

#7. An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.

Karl Marx

#8. They don't know it, but they are doing it.

Karl Marx

#9. If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

Karl Marx

#10. The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Karl Marx

#11. But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.

Karl Marx

#12. To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.

Karl Marx

#13. They are my slaves [ books and papers ] and they must serve me as I please.

Karl Marx

#14. To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

Karl Marx

#15. An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.

Karl Marx

#16. Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.

Karl Marx

#17. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

Karl Marx

#18. All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.

Karl Marx

#19. Follow your own path, no matter what people say.

Karl Marx

#20. 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

#21. The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.

Karl Marx

#22. We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.

Karl Marx

#23. Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

Karl Marx

#24. Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.

Karl Marx

#25. In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

Karl Marx

#26. The brilliancy of Aristotle's genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, "in truth," was at the bottom of this equality.

Karl Marx

#27. A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.

Karl Marx

#28. The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.

Karl Marx

#29. Nobody - not even "a musician of the future" - can live upon future products.

Karl Marx

#30. Work is external to the worker ... It is not part of his nature; consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself ... The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless.

Karl Marx

#31. 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

#32. All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature

Karl Marx

#33. The formula for the circuit of capital: M-C...P...C'-M', is the self-evident form of the circuit of capital only on the basis of already developed capitalist production, because it presupposes the availability of the class of wage-labourers in sufficient numbers throughout society.

Karl Marx

#34. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.24

Karl Marx

#35. As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.

Karl Marx

#36. As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone .

Karl Marx

#37. Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are ... the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomena

Karl Marx

#38. Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

(Marx, 1963)

Karl Marx

#39. May the devil take these peoples movements, especially when they are 'peaceful'.

Karl Marx

#40. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps

Karl Marx

#41. 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

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

#44. As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.10

Karl Marx

#45. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]

Karl Marx

#46. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Karl Marx

#47. Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Karl Marx

#48. Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe.

Karl Marx

#49. The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Karl Marx

#50. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

Karl Marx

#51. The labour-power is a commodity , not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.

Karl Marx

#52. The world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs.

Karl Marx

#53. The unity is brought about by force .

Karl Marx

#54. One capitalist always kills many.

Karl Marx

#55. Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

Karl Marx

#56. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

Karl Marx

#57. Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

#59. As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

#61. With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.

Karl Marx

#62. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Karl Marx

#63. Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

Karl Marx

#64. Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

Karl Marx

#65. The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

Karl Marx

#66. For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.

Karl Marx

#67. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.

Karl Marx

#68. 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

#69. Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history

Karl Marx

#70. 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

#71. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

Karl Marx

#72. 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

#73. The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that ... each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity.

Karl Marx

#74. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

Karl Marx

#75. There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

Karl Marx

#76. What is crucial in the true state is not the fact that every citizen has the chance to devote himself to the universal interest in the shape of a particular class, but the capacity of the universal class to be really universal, i.e. to be the class of every citizen.

Karl Marx

#77. An abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy .

Karl Marx

#78. Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Karl Marx

#79. Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

Karl Marx

#80. The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Karl Marx

#81. A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.

Karl Marx

#82. The social revolution ... cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

Karl Marx

#83. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.

Karl Marx

#84. The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.

Karl Marx

#85. 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

#86. Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice
Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)

Karl Marx

#87. Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled.

Karl Marx

#88. If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
[In a letter about the peculiar 'Marxism' which arose in France 1882]

Karl Marx

#89. Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.

Karl Marx

#90. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole

Karl Marx

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.

Karl Marx

#94. When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.

Karl Marx

#95. Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change it.

Karl Marx

#96. 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

#97. Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression.

Karl Marx

#98. An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.

Karl Marx

#99. Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.

Karl Marx

#100. This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.

Karl Marx