In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.
Philosophy is to science as masturbation is to sex.
Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.
The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.
The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.
The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.
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.
In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.
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.
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbrinding, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism. . . . The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system.
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.
Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.
To discover the various use of things is the work of history.
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
Ideas do not exist separately from language.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
Junk food, empty calories and carbs are the Big Data of the masses
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
Nature is man's inorganic body -- that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.
Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.
I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.
One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.
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.
We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.
Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.
Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.
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).
A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.
Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.
In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
Be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.
He who before was the money owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his laborer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other hesitant, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but a hiding.
I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.
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.
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.
The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.
If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.
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.
There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them.
Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value.
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.
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.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
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.
Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences.
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with there capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
Follow your own path, no matter what people say.
