Karl Marx Quotes

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.

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.

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

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.

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

The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.

Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change it.

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.

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

Those dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff will see that we're the only chaps who haven't been stultified by the ghastly period of peace.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice.

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 science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

The religious world is but a reflex of the real world.

The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. (Preface to the French edition).

Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.

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.

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

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

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.

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

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

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.

But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.

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

The unity is brought about by force .

Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.

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

Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.

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

The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value .

Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.

As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.

Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.

Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are... the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomena

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.

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.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones.

The burgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization.

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

The criticism of Religion is the beginning of all criticism