Thoughts by Karl Marx Quotes in English Quotation

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.

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.

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him.

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 labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

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.

But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population.

Karl Marx Thought in English

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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.

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

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

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

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

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

This class has always to sacrifice a part of itself in order not to be wholly destroyed.

- Quotation

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

History is the judge - its executioner, the proletarian.

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

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

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

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

An abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy .

As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.

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

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

The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.

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

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

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

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

I am nothing but I must be everything.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.

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

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

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

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Karl Marx Quotes in English

Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

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

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

Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.

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

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

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

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

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.

Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.

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

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Religion is the opiate of the masses.

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Everyone of our relationships with nature and man must be a definite expression of our real, individual life.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.

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

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Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

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

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Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.

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While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

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To be radical is to grasp things by the root.

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The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.

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

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

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

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.

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Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps.

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Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.

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The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist's mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body.

Political Economy regards the proletarian … like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

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.

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

Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.

What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.

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.

From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need.

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.

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

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

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

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

The heart of a man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

I am not a Marxist.

For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.

Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren’t his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he’s lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.

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.

But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.

All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations. The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

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.

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

The bourgeoisie is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself.

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.

It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.

The emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation - and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.

The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.

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.

Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].

The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.

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.

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.

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.

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.

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.

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.

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

Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

Government hears only its own voice … It knows it hears only its own voice and yet it deceives itself that it hears the people’s voice.

The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.

The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.

Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.

The various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries afterwards.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.

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

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

Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.

My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite.

I am a machine condemned to devour books.

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.

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

To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.

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

All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

Moments are the elements of profit

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

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

You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.

The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

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.

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe.

As individuals express their life, so they are.

The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.

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

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.

Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.

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

Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

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.

All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature.

Marx himself makes it clear that he does not start from a basic concept – value – but from an elementary material phenomenon – the commodity – which is at the basis of capitalism, as the only economic organization based upon generalized commodity production.

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.

It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expedience of capital punishment could be founded in a society glorying in its civilization.

The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom.

The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.

Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.

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.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

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.

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.

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.

A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. If a palace rises besides the little house, the little house shrinks into a hut.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

History is thorough, and passes through many phases when it bears an old figure to the grave. The last phase of a world historical figure is its comedy.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.

These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

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.

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

One must force the frozen circumstances to dance, by singing to them their own melody.

The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put.

They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.

All economists share the error of examining surplus-value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent.

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.

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

In fact, the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

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.

Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower.

Truth is general, it does not belong to me alone, it belongs to all, it owns me, I do not own it. My property is the form, which is my spiritual individuality.

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.

I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’ I meant a ‘League’ that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.

I laugh at the so-called 'practical' people and their wisdom. If one wants to live like a beast, it could naturally do, to turn its back on humanity's suffering and only care about its own pelt.

I find television,radio very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.

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

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.

The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital.

The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

Theory becomes realized among a people only in so far as it represents the realization of that people's needs.

From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

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.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.

Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

Man makes religion, religion does not make Man.

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.

Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity

On the basis of capitalist production, a new swindle with the wages of management develops in connection with joint-stock companies, in that, over and above the actual managing director, a number of governing and supervisory boards arise, for which management and supervision are in fact a mere pretext for the robbery of shareholders and their own enrichment.

We have thus seen that even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion.

The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.

In our reflecting and reasoning age, a man is not worth much who cannot give a good reason for everything, no matter how bad or crazy. Everything in the world that has been done wrong, has been done wrong for the very best of reasons.

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.

For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries unite!

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

Self-contempt is a serpent that ever gnaws at one's breath, sucking the life-blood from one's own heart and mixing it with the poison of misanthropy and despair.

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.

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

Karl Marx Thoughts in English