Karl Marx – 34 Quotes

34 Quotes by Karl Marx

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

– Karl Marx

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

– 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

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

– Karl Marx

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

– Karl Marx

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

– 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

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

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

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

– Karl Marx

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

– Karl Marx

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

– Karl Marx

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

– Karl Marx

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

– Karl Marx

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

– 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

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

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

– Karl Marx

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

– 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

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 meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

– Karl Marx

Religion is the opium of the masses.

– Karl Marx

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

– 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

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 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

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

– Karl Marx

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

– 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

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

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

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

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