Karl Marx Quotes

“So in Jewry we recognise a contemporary universal anti-social phenomenon, which has reached its present pitch through a process of, historical development in which the Jews have zealously co-operated. And this evil anti-social aspect of Jewry has grown to a stage at which: it must necessarily collapse.”

“Music is the mirror of reality.”

“Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.”

“[Napoleon] swept away everywhere the establishments of feudality. ... [He was] Caesar himself.”

“If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”

“Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled.”

“History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce.”

“The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

“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.”

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.”

“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”

“The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.”

“Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect.”

“They don't know it, but they are doing it.”

“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.”

“All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice.”

“All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.”

“The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.”

“...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.”

“There is no greater stupidity than for people...to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life.”

“A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.”

“If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.”

“The world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs.”

“Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”

“Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”