These Karl Marx quotes will show you a glimpse of this brilliant man and understand his beliefs.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born on 5 May 1818 was an 18th-century German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, and socialist revolutionary. Even though he was from the 18th century, his theories and ideas still have an influence on society today.
Marx was born in Germany who studied law and philosophy. He gets married to Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Some of his best books are The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. The Communist Manifesto is still the most important piece of literature of its time.
Karl’s has left an enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history with his political and philosophical thoughts. His theories about society, economics, and politics are called Marxism.
Marx has been one of the most influential figures in human history. Also, his work has been both, loved and criticized. Many intellectuals, artists, and political parties worldwide have been modifying or adapting his ideas.
Here we are sharing a collection of Karl Marx Famous Quotes for you to understand the beliefs of one of history’s most influential men and also give you some knowledge of philosophy and literature.
Karl Marx Famous Quotes
“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
― Karl Marx
“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.”
― Karl Marx
“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
― Karl Marx
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“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.”
― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
“Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.”
― Karl Marx
“I am nothing but I must be everything.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”
― Karl Marx
“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Karl Marx Communist Manifesto Quotes
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
― Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
“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. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
“Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.”
― Karl Marx
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?”
― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
― Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx Quotes On Religion
“For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while 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, herdsman or critic.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
― karl marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“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
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”
― Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”
― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. [from Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung]”
― Karl Marx
“Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital/Das kommunistische Manifest
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
― Karl Marx
Karl Marx Quotes On Capitalism
“The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“If you love without evoking love in return – if through the vital expression of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.”
― Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
― Karl Marx
“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.”
― Karl Marx
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
― Karl Marx
“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
― Karl Marx
“the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“I am a machine condemned to devour books.”
― Karl Marx
Karl Marx Racist Quotes
“Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.”
― Karl Marx
“Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world… of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.”
― Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question
“To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.”
― Karl Marx
“It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.”
― Karl Marx
“Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital
“Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.”
― Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
“You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.”
― Karl Marx
“Political power, properly so-called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“Moments are the elements of profit”
― Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
“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.”
― Karl Marx
Karl Marx Best Quotes On Love
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
― Karl Marx
“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Volumes One and Two
“As individuals express their life, so they are.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
“Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”
― Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.”
― Karl Marx
“Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
― Karl Marx
“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.”
― Karl Marx
“Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx Quotes On Socialism And Money
“In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.”
― Karl Marx
“The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions”
― Karl Marx
“All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”
― Karl Marx
“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
― Karl Marx
“Ignorance never yet helped anybody.”
― Karl Marx
“Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.”
― Karl Marx
“If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent— a misfortune.”
― Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital – Capital
“The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion”
― Karl Marx
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
― Karl Marx
Do you feel inspired by Karl Marx quotes?
Give Karl Marx‘s work a try even if you are not a communist, socialist, and Marxist. He is cited as the principal architect of modern social science. People still get inspired and explore Marx’s theories even after so many years have been passed for his work to be published.
Even if you don’t have the time to go through the history or read his books, these Karl Marx quotes will give you the glimpse of his work which has been published in his books. You may not know but his principles and ideologies are followed by many countries. Even if you don’t like his theories or those countries’ policies, it is still good to know how he still has influenced on us in so many levels.
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