Karl marx quotes

Man makes religion, religion does not make man

The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that . . . each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity.

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

Religion is the opium of the masses.

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

There are no circumstances imaginable, not even victory, under which the proletariat should give up its possession of arms.

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

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

The way people get their living determines their social outlook.

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?

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

The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, , etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

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.

The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.

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

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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

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

We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.

The weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons.

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

Last words are for those fools who believe they have not yet said enough.

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

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

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

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

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it.

Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.

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

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

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

I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.

Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.

The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.

When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They open declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

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

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.

...the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille

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.

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

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.

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

Communism begins where atheism begins.

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.

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.

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

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

The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.

May the devil take these peoples movements, especially when they are 'peaceful'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow your own path, no matter what people say.

Without the presence of class warfare, trade unions would be hard put to justfy their existence.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.

I am nothing but I must be everything.

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

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.

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital ... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.

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

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.

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

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

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

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

Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.

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

The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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

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

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

Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.

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

Change the economic base and you will change human beings.

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

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

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

The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

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.

Misery motivates, not utopia.

History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce.

A nation that enslaves another forges its own chains.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

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

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

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

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

Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

To destroy Christianity, we must first destroy the British Empire.

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

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.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.

A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew - not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. ... What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man - and turns them into commodities. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole

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

The unity is brought about by force .

Take away a nation's heritage and they are more easily persuaded.

...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.

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.

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