Karl Marx Quotes & Sayings

Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities. — Karl Marx

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production. — Karl Marx

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

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

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. — Karl Marx

Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates. — Karl Marx

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself. — Karl Marx

The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world. — Karl Marx

What I did that was new was to prove that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production; that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; and that dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. — Karl Marx

The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money. — Karl Marx

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

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents. — Karl Marx

Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating."[164] If the transformation of merchants' money into capital is to be explained otherwise than by the producers being simply cheated, a long series of intermediate steps would be necessary, which, at present, when the simple circulation of commodities forms our only assumption, are entirely wanting. — Karl Marx

Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine. — Karl Marx

Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity. — Karl Marx

If the State is to have reality as the ethical, self-conscious realization of spirit, it must be distinguished from the form of authority and faith. But this distinction arises only in so far as the ecclesiastical side is in itself divided into several churches. Then only is the State seen to be superior to them, and wins and brings into existence the universality of thought as the principle of its form. — Karl Marx

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's, etc. — Karl Marx

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. — Karl Marx

The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker. — Karl Marx

Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change 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

English law in 1572 decreed that beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless some one will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offense, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons. — Karl Marx

The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present — Karl Marx

Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman. — Karl Marx

If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction. He will then agree with Sismondi: that capacity for labour ... is nothing unless it is sold. — Karl Marx

The best thing for rich people to do is become Batman — Karl Marx

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. — Karl Marx

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

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. — Karl Marx

The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. — 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

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. — Karl Marx

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion. — Karl Marx

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains. — Karl Marx

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer. — Karl Marx

The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value . — Karl Marx

No eunuch flatters his tyrant more shamefully or seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry, the entrepreneur, in order to acquire a few silver coins or to charm the gold from the purse of his dearly beloved neighbor. — Karl Marx

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

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology. — Karl Marx

Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.[46] — Karl Marx

Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I'll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. — Karl Marx

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. — Karl Marx

Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism. — Karl Marx

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. — Karl Marx

Men make their own history — Karl Marx

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery — Karl Marx

I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. — Karl Marx

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. — Karl Marx

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

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

Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself. — Karl Marx

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. — 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

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. — Karl Marx

There are no bigger donkeys than these workers ... Look at our 'craftsmen'; Sad that world history should be be made with such people. — Karl Marx

I am a machine condemned to devour books. — Karl Marx

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century. — Karl Marx

I am nothing but I must be everything. — Karl Marx

Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state — Karl Marx

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. — Karl Marx

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love. — Karl Marx

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom. — Karl Marx

[The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection ... If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [ Dichter ], but never a perfected, a truly great man. — Karl Marx

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

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money. — Karl Marx

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary — Karl Marx

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed. — Karl Marx

The past lies like a nightmare upon the present. — Karl Marx

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary. — Karl Marx

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

Imperialism is da woist thing I ever hoid! — Karl Marx

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. — Karl Marx

My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism. — Karl Marx

Capital collapses because it cannot exist alongside shared knowledge — Karl Marx

Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production. — Karl Marx

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand. — Karl Marx

The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living. — Karl Marx

Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand - a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear - while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again? — Karl Marx

There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror. — Karl Marx

The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing. — Karl Marx

We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass. — Karl Marx

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom
free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. — Karl Marx

A nation which enslaves another forges its own chains. — Karl Marx

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones. — Karl Marx

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

The criticism of Religion is the beginning of all criticism — Karl Marx

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. — Karl Marx

If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. — Karl Marx

The capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property: in other words, the expropriation of the labourer. — Karl Marx

The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified. — Karl Marx

[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included). — Karl Marx

The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more disgraceful by publishing it. — Karl Marx

In money-lenders' capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented. — Karl Marx

Defining by a general law the expenditures on the ... school ... is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. — Karl Marx

Nature is man's inorganic body
that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature
i.e., nature is his body
and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. — Karl Marx

In its rational form [dialectic] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary. — Karl Marx

[Napoleon] swept away everywhere the establishments of feudality ... [He was] Caesar himself. — Karl Marx

[T]he 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

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

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