The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
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]
The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.
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.
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
I am nothing but I must be everything.
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!
Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!
Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
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]
The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
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.
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
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.
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.
Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.
The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.
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 increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.
Moments are the elements of profit
Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state
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.
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.
The best thing for rich people to do is become Batman
You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
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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)
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.
To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.
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 ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.
I am a machine condemned to devour books.
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 more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
As individuals express their life, so they are.
Machinery which is not used is not capital.
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.
Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Ignorance never yet helped anybody.
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
Nobody — not even “a musician of the future” — can live upon future products.
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.
The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.
The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.
Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.
Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.
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.
Ser radical é tomar as coisas pela raiz. Mas, para o homem, a raiz é o próprio homem.
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.
The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
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.
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 first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion
As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.
Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.
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
Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, here dance!
The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present
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.
