Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.”

— Karl Marx

102. “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

103. “If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it, it would have been much better.”

— Karl Marx

104. “The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.”

— Karl Marx

105. “Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital, in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit .”

— Karl Marx

106. “The masses are the asses.”

— Karl Marx

107. “I do not like money, money is the reason we fight.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

109. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

— Karl Marx

110. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”

— Karl Marx

111. “The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

— Karl Marx

112. “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”

— Karl Marx

113. “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”

— Karl Marx

114. “Misery motivates, not utopia.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

116. “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it.”

— Karl Marx

117. “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”

— Karl Marx

118. “Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.”

— Karl Marx

119. “Darwin has interested us in the history of nature’s technology.”

— Karl Marx

120. “The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.”

— Karl Marx

121. “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

124. “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.”

— Karl Marx

125. “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.”

— Karl Marx

126. “But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.”

— Karl Marx

127. “A heavy or progressive or graduated income tax is necessary for the proper development of Communism.”

— Karl Marx

128. “Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.”

— Karl Marx

129. “Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.”

— Karl Marx

130. “The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.”

— Karl Marx

131. “Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

133. “Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.”

— Karl Marx

134. “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it.”

— Karl Marx

135. “Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

— Karl Marx

136. “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.”

— Karl Marx

137. “Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.”

— Karl Marx

138. “The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

140. “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

— Karl Marx

141. “All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.”

— Karl Marx

142. “Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.”

— Karl Marx

143. “There are no circumstances imaginable, not even victory, under which the proletariat should give up its possession of arms.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

145. “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.”

— Karl Marx

146. “If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

149. “The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.”

— Karl Marx

150. “When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.”

— Karl Marx