Quotes By 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.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

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

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

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

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

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.