Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

53. “Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

55. “I am a machine condemned to devour books.”

— Karl Marx

56. “They don’t know it, but they are doing it.”

— Karl Marx

57. “No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.”

— Karl Marx

58. “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

60. “In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

63. “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.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

65. “The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value .”

— Karl Marx

66. “The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.”

— Karl Marx

67. “All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.”

— Karl Marx

68. “Last words are for those fools who believe they have not yet said enough...”

— Karl Marx

69. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.”

— Karl Marx

70. “Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I’ll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

72. “The best thing for rich people to do is become Batman.”

— Karl Marx

73. “Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.”

— Karl Marx

74. “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.”

— Karl Marx

75. “Take away a nation’s heritage and they are more easily persuaded.”

— Karl Marx

76. “Junk food, empty calories and carbs are the Big Data of the masses.”

— Karl Marx

77. “The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

79. “Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.”

— Karl Marx

80. “The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.”

— Karl Marx

81. “Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value.”

— Karl Marx

82. “The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.”

— Karl Marx

83. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

— Karl Marx

84. “Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.”

— Karl Marx

85. “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.”

— Karl Marx

86. “The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.”

— Karl Marx

87. “Democracy is the road to socialism, and writing for the Reader Weekly is the road to being an unemployed 32-year-old whose relatives still put money in his birthday cards.”

— Karl Marx

88. “One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.”

— Karl Marx

89. “Moments are the elements of profit.”

— Karl Marx

90. “The capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property: in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.”

— Karl Marx

91. “The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.”

— Karl Marx

92. “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.”

— Karl Marx

93. “All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.”

— Karl Marx

94. “In the bureaucracy, the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.”

— Karl Marx

95. “The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality.”

— Karl Marx

96. “Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.”

— Karl Marx

97. “The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.”

— Karl Marx

98. “It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.”

— Karl Marx

99. “The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy, world domination, is a fixed star. About Russia.”

— Karl Marx

100. “We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.”

— Karl Marx