Karl Marx Quotes

“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”

“Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change it.”

“In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.”

“What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.”

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

“Misery motivates, not utopia.”

“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.”

“The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism. . . . The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system.”

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

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it”

“Ideas do not exist separately from language.”

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

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

“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.”

“In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”

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

“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.”

“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”

“In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.”

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

“All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”

“Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.”

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

“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.”

“It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.”

“The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.”

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

“All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy”

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

“The weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons.”

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

“Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer.”

“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.”

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

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

“Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”

“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.”

“All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.”

“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).”

“Moments are the elements of profit”

“Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.”

“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”

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

“Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.”

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