Top 418 Quotes & Sayings by Karl Marx - Page 3

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it

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.

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.

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.

The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.

In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.

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

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.

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.

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

The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.

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

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.

The criticism of Religion is the beginning of all criticism

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

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

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.

The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

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.

In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred.

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

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

Misery motivates, not utopia.

...the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789... gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.

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.

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

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.

Crack-brained meddling by the authorities [can] aggravate an existing crisis.

Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!

A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.

The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

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 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.

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

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.

The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got

Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.

Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.

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

We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.

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

They don't know it, but they are doing it.

Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, i.e, of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.

...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.

The wealthy man is the man whois much, not the one who has much

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

Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. 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.

The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.

Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

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.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

Music is the mirror of reality.