Karl Marx Quotes

But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling class are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society.

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.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

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.

There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I'll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Man makes religion, religion does not make man

In the bureaucracy, the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole

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.

As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

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

Religion is the opiate of the people.

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

...the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required.

Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities.

The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.

The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.

There are no circumstances imaginable, not even victory, under which the proletariat should give up its possession of arms.

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 bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

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

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

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.

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

It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.

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.

Free education for all children in public schools... Combination of education with industrial production

In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.

All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?

In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians.

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

Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.