Karl Marx Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.

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

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

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

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

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

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

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.

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

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

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

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

Religion is the opiate of the people.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

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

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

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

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

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

Philosophy is to science as masturbation is to sex.

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.

A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.

Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

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

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.