100 Quotes by Karl Marx
Karl Marx, a profound thinker of the 19th century, laid the cornerstone for modern socio-political thought with his revolutionary ideas on economics, class struggle, and the nature of society. Born in Germany, he collaborated with Friedrich Engels to develop the theory of communism, critiquing the capitalist system and advocating for a society where the means of production are collectively owned. Marx's work, including "The Communist Manifesto" and "Das Kapital," has had a lasting impact on both political theory and the course of history, shaping movements and revolutions across the globe. His analysis of societal inequalities and his call for a more equitable world continue to inspire discussions on the role of government, the distribution of wealth, and the pursuit of social justice.
Karl Marx Quotes
Communism begins where atheism begins. (Meaning)
Democracy is the road to socialism. (Meaning)
A people without a heritage are easily persuaded. (Meaning)
History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce. (Meaning)
The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry (Meaning)
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. (Meaning)
Follow your own path, no matter what people say. (Meaning)
I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above. (Meaning)
Religion is the opium of the masses. (Meaning)
To be radical is to grasp things by the root. (Meaning)
I do not like money, money is the reason we fight. (Meaning)
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. (Meaning)
Man makes religion, religion does not make man (Meaning)
I am nothing but I must be everything. (Meaning)
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist. (Meaning)
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. (Meaning)
Revolutions are the locomotives of history. (Meaning)
In my free time I do differential and integral calculus. (Meaning)
Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary. (Meaning)
Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets! (Meaning)
Men make their own history (Meaning)
One capitalist always kills many. (Meaning)
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases. (Meaning)
The religious world is but a reflex of the real world. (Meaning)
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. (Meaning)
Moments are the elements of profit (Meaning)
I am nothing and should be everything. (Meaning)
Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.
If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.
Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.
There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery
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.
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole
Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.
Follow your own path, no matter what people say.
The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry
The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled.
The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
Democracy is the road to socialism.
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce.
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.
A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.
Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.
Last words are for those fools who believe they have not yet said enough.
Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.
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.
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
Religion is the opium of the masses.
The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.
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. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
I am nothing but I must be everything.
Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?
Men make their own history
Communism begins where atheism begins.
They don't know it, but they are doing it.
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage , in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy .
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
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.
Without the presence of class warfare, trade unions would be hard put to justfy their existence.
Change the economic base and you will change human beings.
The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.
All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.
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.
The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Take away a nation's heritage and they are more easily persuaded.
Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!
I do not like money, money is the reason we fight.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
Communism is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
Misery motivates, not utopia.
The wealthy man is the man whois much, not the one who has much
The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.
Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.
The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.
If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it
The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it.
There are no circumstances imaginable, not even victory, under which the proletariat should give up its possession of arms.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that . . . each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity.
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.
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.
We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. - Manifesto of the Communist Party
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.
In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.
The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.
Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital. Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.
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.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.
We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.
The very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.
Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.
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.
To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
...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.
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
Under private property, each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.
There is no greater stupidity than for people...to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life.
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.
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.
A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.
You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.
May the devil take these peoples movements, especially when they are 'peaceful'.
In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred.
Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.
The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.
Man makes religion, religion does not make man
The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy, world domination, is a fixed star. About Russia
The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
The way people get their living determines their social outlook.
So in Jewry we recognise a contemporary universal anti-social phenomenon, which has reached its present pitch through a process of, historical development in which the Jews have zealously co-operated. And this evil anti-social aspect of Jewry has grown to a stage at which: it must necessarily collapse.
In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.
But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling class are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society.
The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
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.
With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.
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 working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got
Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.
― Karl Marx Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
