Karl Marx

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology

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

“Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”
― Karl Marx

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

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

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

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

Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx

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

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
Karl Marx

“The way people get their living determines their social outlook.”
― Karl Marx

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

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
Karl Marx

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

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
Karl Marx

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

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

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
Karl Marx

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
Karl Marx

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

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
Karl Marx

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
Karl Marx

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

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
Karl Marx

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

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
Karl Marx

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

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

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

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
Karl Marx

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

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
Karl Marx

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

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

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Karl Marx

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
― Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

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

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.
Karl Marx

“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?”
― Karl Marx

“Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.”
― Karl Marx

“It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have ope

d hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
― Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

“Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,
and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance
of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes
suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape
of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no
longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes
valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with
the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,
declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a
commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul
after money, the only wealth.”
― Karl Marx

“The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“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.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Since the mass of the employed living labour is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialised labour set in motion by it, i.e., to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of living labour, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the of profit, this must constantly fall.”
― Karl Marx

“The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.”
― Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy

Last modified: March, 12, 2019