Karl Marx Quotes

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

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

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.

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

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps

[representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,

One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie.

Ignorance never yet helped anybody.

He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.

What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.

As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.

The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.

The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.

Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

Capital is dead labor that vampirelike lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it suck.

All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.

The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself.

Religion is the opium of the people.

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!

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

Change is triggered by Experience and Expectation