Karl Marx Quotes

“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

“Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.”

“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.”

“The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value .”

“The unity is brought about by force .”

“Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”

“Ideas do not exist separately from language.”

“A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.”

“Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.”

“For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.”

“Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.”

“...it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”

“Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)”

“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, posses however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.”

“Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.”

“When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.”

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment.”

“In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.”

“The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker.”

“I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.”

“Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.”

“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.”

“Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.”

“Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.”

“Democracy is the road to socialism.”