Karl Marx Quotes

Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression.

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.

Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.

Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.

When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.

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

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

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic race at all, they are des intrus [intruders], who must be chased back across the Dnieper, etc.

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

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

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

...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.

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.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

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.

A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.

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

In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.

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.

Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital , in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit .

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.

Since only what is material is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.

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

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

To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.

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

The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.

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

I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.

The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.

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.

Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.

If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

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

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds.

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

The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom.

An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.

[Napoleon] swept away everywhere the establishments of feudality. ... [He was] Caesar himself.