Karl Marx Quotes

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 meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

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

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

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.

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.

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

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

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

A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.

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

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

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

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

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

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.

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

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.