The German revolutionary socialist Karl Marx was also a philosopher, economist, sociologist, and journalist. Undoubtedly, the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century, he did not achieve much fame during his lifetime but his popularity soared in the decades following his death. As a young man he studied law for sometime before earning a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. His collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels led to several influential works including the 1848 pamphlet ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ Over his long career, Marx propounded several theories about society, economics and politics which came to be collectively known as Marxism.  Regarded as one of the most influential figures in human history, his contribution to the development of intellectual, economic, and political history has been immense. This collection of quotes by Karl Marx brings to you his knowledge and wisdom in form of easy to read and short quotations.
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
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]
- Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, 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.
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
- Karl Marx
I am nothing but I must be everything.
- Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx
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 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
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.
- Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
- Karl Marx
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
[In a letter about the peculiar 'Marxism' which arose in France 1882]
- Karl Marx
The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
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.
- Capital, Karl Marx
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
- Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844/The Communist Manifesto, 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
Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
- Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 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.
- The Communist Manifesto, 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
Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.
- Das Kapital/Das kommunistische Manifest, Karl Marx
The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.
- Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844/The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
Moments are the elements of profit
- Capital, Karl Marx
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.
- Karl Marx
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.
- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx
Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state
- Das Kapital, Karl Marx
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
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.
- Karl Marx
Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!
- Capital, Karl Marx
Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice
-- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)
- Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence 1844-1877, Karl Marx
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
- 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
The best thing for rich people to do is become Batman
- Karl Marx
To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.
- Karl Marx
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.
- Karl Marx
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
- Karl Marx
The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
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.
- Capital, Karl Marx
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
- Karl Marx
All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
- Karl Marx
I am a machine condemned to devour books.
- 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.
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx
Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.
Atheism” ... reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man.
Marx, Letter to 30 November 1842
- Karl Marx
Jaminan kemerdekaan bangsa ialah pada kemerdekaan jiwa.
- Karl Marx
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.
- Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Karl Marx
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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx
Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.
- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.
- Karl Marx
Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
- Karl Marx
All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.
- Karl Marx
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.
- Karl Marx
Ser radical é tomar as coisas pela raiz. Mas, para o homem, a raiz é o próprio homem.
- Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx
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.
- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx
Nobody — not even “a musician of the future” — can live upon future products.
- Karl Marx
The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
- Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Karl Marx
The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.
- Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Karl Marx
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
- Karl Marx
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.
- Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx
The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.
- Karl Marx
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 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion
- Karl Marx
As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.
- Capital, Karl Marx
Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.
- Karl Marx
Everyone of our relationships with nature and man must be a definite expression of our real, individual life.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Here is the rose, here dance!
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx
The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present
- Karl Marx
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.
- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx
Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.
- Das Kapital - Capital, Karl Marx
Ji bilî zincîrên xwe tiÅŸtekî ku proleter ji dest bidin nîn e. Lê cîhaneke ku bi dest bixin heye.
Karkerên hemû welatan, bibin yek!
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