Karl Marx Quotes

“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.”

“If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one's back on hum suffering and look after one's own skin.”

“The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”

“Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.”

“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.”

“Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”

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

“A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.”

“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”

“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

“Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.”

“Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.”

“I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.”

“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.”

“Change the economic base and you will change human beings.”

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

“The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.”

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

“I am nothing but I must be everything.”

“Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.”

“Moments are the elements of profit”

“Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.”

“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.”

“When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.”