Karl Marx Quotes

   
Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female
sex. 
 
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. 
 
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. 
 
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of
interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. 
 
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world
to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite! 
 
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist. 
 
The more the division of labor and the application of machinery
extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the
more do their wages shrink together. 
 
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences
it cannot understand. 
 
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not
fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this. 
 
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains. 
 
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state. 
 
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less
developed, the image of its own future. 
 
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a
good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending. 
 
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can
change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which
these laws expose themselves. 
 
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence:
Abolish all private property. 

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. 
 
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. 
 
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless
under compulsion from society. 
 
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling
class. 
 
A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism. 
 
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the
capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor. 
 
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the
consciousness of necessity. 
 
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while
the living person is dependent and has no individuality. 
 
Revolutions are the locomotives of history. 
 
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a
rational miser. 
 
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases. 
The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its
value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no
relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production. 
 
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same
time the immortal movement of its time. 

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

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it

were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the
activity of men in pursuit of their ends. 
 
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not
merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself
only in the midst of society. 
 
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e.,
the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force. 

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living

labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. 
 
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. 
 
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. 
 
The development of civilization and industry in general has always
shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that
has been done for their conservation and production is completely
insignificant in comparison. 
 
Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social
changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress
can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly
ones included. 
 
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the
people. 
 
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of
religion. 
 
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most
people happy. 
 
Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it
has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth
living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs. 
 
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless
people. 
 
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. 
 
Democracy is the road to socialism. 
 
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism. 
 
Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man,
just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science:
there will be one science. 
 
On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness
of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its
great intellects. 
 
Religion is the opium of the masses. 
 
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. 
 
In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow
horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on
its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs.
 
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. 
 
There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism. 

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers
of the world unite. 
 
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class
struggles. 
 
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by
him. 

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-

do idlers. 
 
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its
mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it. 
 
The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What
they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour. 
 
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing.
But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in
metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.