Sociologist Quotes

“The labour-power is a commodity , not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.”

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”

“No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.”

“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.”

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

“Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.”

“The rule of the bourgeois democrats [in pre-federal Germany], from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction”

“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.”

“This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.”

“The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

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

“The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.”

“The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage , in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy .”

“Misery motivates, not utopia.”

“Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough. To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.”

“Follow your own path, no matter what people say.”

“Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.”

“English law in 1572 decreed that beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless some one will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offense, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons.”

“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”

“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.”

“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.”

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