Quotes & Sayings About Marx

Groucho Marx shot back angrily, "The Sandy McPhersons and Yonny Yohnsons were not a minority being subjected to oppression, restriction, segregation or persecution. — Kliph Nesteroff

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

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist 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

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury. — Groucho Marx

Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines. — Karl Marx

Life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do. — Woody Allen

EASY PHILOSOPHY
by
Peter Cole Friedman

as soon as you get pubes

you'll start reading Marx

then ideally some Plato

some Descartes or Kant

which sound like aperitifs

then you'll talk

to other people who read

this stuff

you'll talk about life

and other big subjects

but mostly about this stuff

and you'll recognize the names

of the scholars in the field

and you'll start citing things

they've said about the stuff

and they will alight as they do

on your dandelion brain

like fat birds and one day you will

bend and bend so much

that you'll almost forget the world

has a sun which feeds you

even with your mouth closed — Peter Cole Friedman

The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living. — Karl Marx

When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer. — Karl Marx

Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course. — Tom Robbins

We can enhance democracy by making it in line with its original vision. Read the dollar bill - E pluribus unum, out of many, one; novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. That's democracy. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

The great human problem of evil stems from the illusion of separateness. Whenever this illusion is overcome, we behave lovingly to one another. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

I want Chinese history to remember me as Carnegie is remembered. I want Chinese people to remember me as they remember Marx and Lenin. — Chen Guangbiao

As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time. — Karl Marx

Political emancipation is a reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an independent and egoistic individual, and on the other hand, to a citizen, a moral person.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power. — Karl Marx

[ ... ] most of the environmental hype [regarding global warming] is really to help bring about Karl Marx's dream (nightmare) of a Communist world. [by reduction, and ultimately elimination of private property rights — Kent Hovind

Marx's critique of free markets and free trade can shed as much devastating light on our own actually existing capitalism as it did for the capitalism of Marx's own time and place. — David Harvey

Ninety percent of all the data in the world has been produced in the last two years. Six thousand YouTube videos are posted a minute - and that figure was computed in 2011; by now there's probably not a number high enough to convey how overwhelming it all is. Here's another cocktail party statistic: The amount of information we generate every two days is equal to the amount produced from the beginning of civilization until 2003. That factoid comes from Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google, so you can partly blame him for all your mental clutter. — Patty Marx

When you get a new worldview you get a new world. It's like the shift from medieval Christianity to the Renaissance and enlightenment. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

Mother Earth is giving birth to a co-creative humanity. There's not a majority anywhere, but it's cropping up everywhere, because old leadership does not have the authority to guide us. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

I don't think it is pressure but I am aware sometimes, especially on this new album, that people were going to really pay attention. — Richard Marx

Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly. — Octavio Paz

Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective. — John Lithgow

Harpo Marx looks like a musical comedy. — Walter Kerr

But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky (the political communist commissar for Education, 1918, fh) 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases. — Marc Chagall

I've got to say, I've probably seen a lot more of the Three Stooges than of the Marx Brothers. — Spike Jonze

Karl Marx famously called religion 'the opiate of the masses.' Buddhism, — John Green

I think that the Peeps or Peppies or Pipes diaries would be much more popular had there been a universal pronuncation of his name. — Groucho Marx

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite. — Karl Marx

Hello, I must be going. — Groucho Marx

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

When those of Jewish blood exhibit moral or intellectual superiority, genius or special talent, we feel pride in them, even if they have abjured the faith like Spinoza, Marx, Disraeli or Heine. Despite the meditations of pundits or the decrees of council, our own instincts and acts, and those of others, have defined for us the term 'Jew.' — Louis D. Brandeis

In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T.S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. — George Orwell

The weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons. — Karl Marx

Criticism has already settled all accounts with this subject. It no longer figures as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation. — Karl Marx

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

For Sorel, the fact that Marx's prediction that contemporary society would increasingly divide itself into two, and no more than two, mutually hostile classes was falsified by time, could be offset by the readiness of the proletariat to remain intransigent, opposing its nonproletarian opponents with absolute determination. — A. James Gregor

I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did. — Steve Jobs

Growing up, I loved drama and fantasies. I hated the Marx Brothers. I took all that confusion seriously. — Anne Meara

I would never join a country club with standards so low as to allow me as a member. — Groucho Marx

As individuals express their life, so they are. — Karl Marx

Budget: a way of going broke methodically — Groucho Marx

One capitalist always kills many. — Karl Marx

Anybody who doesn't like this book is healthy — Groucho Marx

I always preferred Harpo to Groucho Marx. — Lee Evans

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries. — Phillip Adams

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

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse. — Groucho Marx

Today's Father Day and we're giving you a tie, it's not much you know, it's just our way of showing you, you're a regular guy. — Groucho Marx

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

He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. — Harpo Marx

A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism. — Karl Marx

Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere. — Groucho Marx

I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are. — Groucho Marx

Reality is a perpetual process of
evolution, propelled by the fertile impact of antagonisms which are resolved each time into a superior
synthesis which, itself, creates its opposite and again causes history to advance. What Hegel affirmed
concerning reality advancing toward the spirit, Marx affirms concerning economy on the march toward
the classless society; everything is both itself and its opposite, and this contradiction compels it to become
something else. Capitalism, because it is bourgeois, reveals itself as revolutionary and prepares the way
for communism. — Albert Camus

Marx is only anti-capitalist
in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of
history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism,
discipline, force. — Albert Camus

Though the male can be noble in reason and infinite in faculties, he is also easily amused by shiny toys, especially ones that do dumb things on his desk. — Patricia Marx

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough. — Groucho Marx

I hate money and Jews. — Karl Marx

Maybe pretty women were always funny but only now decided to go into comedy, — Patricia Marx

The French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 ... gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order. — Karl Marx

I'm now so keenly aware that I have everything to prove and nothing to lose. — Richard Marx

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems. — Theodore Dalrymple

Karl Heinzen, who retaliated with a memorable portrait of the angry little man. He found Marx 'intolerably dirty', a 'cross between a cat and an ape'; with 'dishevelled coal-black hair and dirty yellow complexion'. It was, he said, impossible to say whether his clothes and skin were naturally mud-coloured or just filthy. He had small, fierce, malicious eyes, 'spitting out spurts of wicked fire'; he had a habit of saying: 'I will annihilate you. — Paul Johnson

Whatever we are going through is part of the planetary struggle to evolve. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

Mr. Speaker, in 1848, Karl Marx said, a progressive income tax is needed to transfer wealth and power to the state. Thus, Marx's Communist Manifesto had as its major economic tenet a progressive income tax. Think about it, 1848 Karl Marx, Communism ... I say it is time to replace the progressive income tax with a national retail sales tax, and it is time to abolish the IRS, my colleagues. I yield back all the rules, regulations, fear, and intimidation of our current system. — James Traficant

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

This popular picture of Marx's 'materialism' - his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination - is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century. — Erich Fromm

We are indebted to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin for giving us a weapon. The weapon is not a machine-gun, but Marxism-Leninism. — Mao Zedong

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

Marriage is a wonderful institution ... but who wants to live in an institution? — Groucho Marx

Anyone buying this book is going to be out a tidy sum if he is sucked in by the title. I wish I could write a real sexy book that would be barred from the mails. Apparently nothing whets a reader's appetite for literature more than the news that the author has been thrown into a federal pokey for disturbing the libido of millions of Americans. — Groucho Marx

For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible. — Ernest Mandel

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

What does Karl Marx put on his pasta? Communist Manipesto! — Stephen Colbert

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. — Karl Marx

The Christian coach keeps ethics in perspective by aligning his principles and values with his biblical worldview, endeavoring to see things from God's point of view. — Michael J. Marx

You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. — Groucho Marx

I feel so often that depression is a signal of more that wants to be expressed within you. There is an innate impulse in everyone to express more of who they truly are, and you get depressed when you don't feel you're able to do that. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

People take songs so literally. — Richard Marx

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

I wish you'd keep my hands to yourself. — Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx continued to alternately call Margaret Dumont "a great lady" and to denigrate her in interviews. But he seemed, at the end, to realize how important she'd been to his career. When accepting his 1974 Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the ailing Groucho told the audience, "I only wish Harpo and Chico could have been here - and Margaret Dumont. — Eve Golden

I've never written a song that I thought was a hit. — Richard Marx

There is no greater stupidity than for people ... to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life. — Karl Marx

Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant. — Karl Marx

I am a man and you are a woman. I can't think of a better arrangement. — Groucho Marx

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social ... The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. — Karl Marx

By understanding evolution as the expression of universal intelligence, now becoming conscious of itself within us, and as us, we overcome the dichotomy between current evolutionists who see no design in evolution, and creationists who often propose and anthropomorphic God as creator. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

A cigar makers organization once said that I was the most famous cigar smoker in the world. I dont know if thats true, but once while visiting Havana, I went to a cigar factory. There were four hundred people there rolling cigars, and when they saw me, they all stood up and applauded. — Groucho Marx

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Here is the rose, here dance! — Karl Marx

Problems are evolutionary drivers. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; — Karl Marx

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. — Karl Marx

When discovered by his wife, kissing the maid, Groucho said, "I was just whispering in her mouth" — Groucho Marx

Policeman: "A hermit eh? Then why's your table set for four?"
Groucho: "That's nothing. My alarm clock is set for eight. — Groucho Marx

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They open declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! — Karl Marx

Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate. — Harold Bloom