Karl Marx Quotations

To get the best of Marx's ideas, it is necessary to read the quotes in context; but, even standing alone, these one-liners illustrate his thinking - and give pause for thought.

"A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism".

"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".

"Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks".

"Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs".

"Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society".

"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".

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

"Democracy is the road to socialism".

"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".

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

"The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery."

"Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy".

"The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion".

"For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him".

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

"Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough".

"Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending".

"History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this".

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

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce".

"The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society".

"I am not a Marxist".

"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".

"If the supply greatly exceeds the demand, then one section of the workers sinks into beggary or starvation. The existence of the worker is, therefore, reduced to the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and he is lucky if he can find a buyer. And the demand on which the worker's life depends is regulated by the whims of the wealthy and the capitalists".

"In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".

"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality".

"It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves".

"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".

"Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed".

"Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor".

"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism".

"Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases".

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past".

"Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state".

"The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together".

"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".

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

"Nothing can have value without being an object of utility".

"On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects".

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them".

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”

"Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex”

"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".

"The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people".

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

"Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand"

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

"Revolutions are the locomotives of history."

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

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

"Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."

"Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex."

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

"The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property."

"There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism."

"We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass."

"While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser."

"Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers."

"The worker does not necessarily gain when the capitalist gains, but he necessarily loses with him."

"Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains."

"The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it."

"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."