Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation.”

— Karl Marx

152. “The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.”

— Karl Marx

153. “A nation which enslaves another forges its own chains.”

— Karl Marx

154. “An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.”

— Karl Marx

155. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

— Karl Marx

156. “The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.”

— Karl Marx

157. “I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.”

— Karl Marx

158. “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.”

— Karl Marx

159. “The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.”

— Karl Marx

160. “The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom.”

— Karl Marx

161. “Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.”

— Karl Marx

162. “Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.”

— Karl Marx

163. “Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”

— Karl Marx

164. “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.”

— Karl Marx

165. “Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.”

— Karl Marx

166. “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.”

— Karl Marx

167. “Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.”

— Karl Marx

168. “As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.”

— Karl Marx

169. “There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.”

— Karl Marx

170. “When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.”

— Karl Marx

171. “An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”

— Karl Marx

172. “Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.”

— Karl Marx

173. “The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”

— Karl Marx

174. “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.”

— Karl Marx

175. “History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.”

— Karl Marx

176. “Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”

— Karl Marx

177. “The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.”

— Karl Marx

178. “The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man’s chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.”

— Karl Marx

179. “Be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.”

— Karl Marx

180. “In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians.”

— Karl Marx

181. “The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.”

— Karl Marx

182. “We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”

— Karl Marx

183. “Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.”

— Karl Marx

184. “Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.”

— Karl Marx

185. “Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect.”

— Karl Marx

186. “All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.”

— Karl Marx

187. “History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.”

— Karl Marx

188. “The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry.”

— Karl Marx

189. “Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man’s animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.”

— Karl Marx

190. “The wealthy man is the man whois much, not the one who has much.”

— Karl Marx

191. “The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

193. “The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

195. “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!”

— Karl Marx

196. “Change the economic base and you will change human beings.”

— Karl Marx

197. “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”

— Karl Marx

198. “Without the presence of class warfare, trade unions would be hard put to justfy their existence.”

— Karl Marx

199. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The.”

— Karl Marx

200. “For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.”

— Karl Marx