Karl Marx Quotes

“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.”

“The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.”

“Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.”

“Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.”

“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.”

“Hazrat Mahal, Begum of Oudh, during the national liberation uprising of 1857-59 in India headed the rebels.”

“Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.”

“Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.”

“The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.”

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”

“The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.”

“Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.”

“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.”

“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

“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.”

“Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.”

“The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.”

“It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.”

“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbrinding, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.”

“The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom.”

“While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.”

“When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.”