The Best Karl Marx quotes

Revolutions are the locomotives of history. — Karl Marx

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature’s technology. — Karl Marx

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

History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce. — Karl Marx

Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled. — Karl Marx

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

History is the judge–its executioner, the proletarian. — Karl Marx

Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. — Karl Marx

If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded. — Karl Marx

When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off. — 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

To discover the various use of things is the work of history. — Karl Marx

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

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history. — Karl Marx

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy. — Karl Marx

The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money. — Karl Marx

Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money. — Karl Marx

Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver. — Karl Marx

Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time. — Karl Marx

Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates. — Karl Marx

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity. — Karl Marx

Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed. — Karl Marx

I do not like money, money is the reason we fight. — Karl Marx

Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities. — Karl Marx

Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same. — Karl Marx

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

Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange, because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison. — Karl Marx

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

The religious world is but a reflex of the real world. — Karl Marx

The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win. — Karl Marx

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

There are no bigger donkeys than these workers…. Look at our ‘craftsmen’; Sad that world history should be be made with such people. — Karl Marx

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex. — Karl Marx

Is a proletariat prime, but 4, 6 and 8 are also composite proletariats. Composites of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains! — Karl Marx

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. — Karl Marx

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

The entire so–called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor. — Karl Marx

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. — Karl Marx

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 world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs. — Karl Marx

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love. — Karl Marx

Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused. — Karl Marx

The task is not just to understand the world but to change it. — Karl Marx

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. — Karl Marx

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 — Karl Marx

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. — Karl Marx

The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity . — Karl Marx

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

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

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange–value either in a pearl or a diamond. — Karl Marx

Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash. — Karl Marx

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 — Karl Marx

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

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed. — Karl Marx

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

An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital. — Karl Marx

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents. — Karl Marx

Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth. — Karl Marx

Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value. — Karl Marx

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. — Karl Marx

There is no greater stupidity than for people…to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life. — Karl Marx

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

My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism. — Karl Marx

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. — Karl Marx

Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds. — Karl Marx

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. — Karl Marx

The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object. — Karl Marx

Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. — Karl Marx

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. — Karl Marx

T]he task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of today’s practice of life, the summit of which is the money system. — Karl Marx

The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life. — Karl Marx

All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force. — Karl Marx

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. — Karl Marx

The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope. — Karl Marx

If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. — Karl Marx

The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits. — Karl Marx

Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker. — Karl Marx

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

So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer. — Karl Marx

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society. — Karl Marx

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. — Karl Marx

In bourgeois society capital is Independent and has Individuality, while the livIng person is dependent and has no Individuality. — Karl Marx

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. — Karl Marx

The hand–mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam–mill society with the industrial capitalist. — Karl Marx

Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect. — Karl Marx

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction. — Karl Marx

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce. — Karl Marx

No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need. — Karl Marx

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

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

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

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

As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand. — Karl Marx

Free education for all children in public schools… Combination of education with industrial production — Karl Marx

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. — Karl Marx

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

The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor–power to the greatest possible extent. — Karl Marx

An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. — Karl Marx

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. — Karl Marx

In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. — Karl Marx

Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital , in its pre–bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit . — 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

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

Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs. — Karl Marx

As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone . — Karl Marx

A great deal of capital, which appears to–day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children. — Karl Marx

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. — Karl Marx

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs. — Karl Marx