Karl Marx Quotes

The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.

The wealthy man is the man whois much, not the one who has much

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

Misery motivates, not utopia.

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

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

Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.

In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.

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

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained.

In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.

When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.

The way people get their living determines their social outlook.

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

The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the center of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 until now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organizationally.

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

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

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

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

May the devil take these peoples movements, especially when they are 'peaceful'.

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.

Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labor is no other than the wage minimum.

Hazrat Mahal, Begum of Oudh, during the national liberation uprising of 1857-59 in India headed the rebels.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of the real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of the spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people.

Crack-brained meddling by the authorities [can] aggravate an existing crisis.

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

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.

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.

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

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

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

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, , etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.

Take away a nation's heritage and they are more easily persuaded.

Music is the mirror of reality.

Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.

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.

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

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.

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