Top 418 Quotes & Sayings by Karl Marx

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German philosopher Karl Marx.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, critic of political economy, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.

German - Philosopher | May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883

Source: Wikipedia

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

Karl Marx

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

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

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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

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.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

Democracy is the road to socialism.

Karl Marx

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

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

Karl Marx

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

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

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Karl Marx

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Karl Marx

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.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

Karl Marx

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

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 development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

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

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

Karl Marx

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Karl Marx

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

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.

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

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!

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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.

Karl Marx

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.

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

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

Karl Marx

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

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

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

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

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx

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