Karl Marx Quotes

“Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.”

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

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. (Preface to the French edition).”

“The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.”

“Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”

“Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.”

“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

“Crack-brained meddling by the authorities [can] aggravate an existing crisis.”

“Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.”

“The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.”

“The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.”

“Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.”

“The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.”

“In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

“Work is external to the worker. . . . It is not part of his nature; consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself. . . . The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless.”

“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

“All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

“In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

“...the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required.”

“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.”

“An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.”

“Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.”

“In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.”

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

“Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it.”