Words matter. These are the best Karl Marx Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
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.
A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.
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.
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
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.
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
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.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
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!
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
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.
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.
Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
