Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”

— Karl Marx

202. “It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”

— Karl Marx

203. “All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.”

— Karl Marx

204. “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.”

— Karl Marx

205. “We cannot tell by looking at the diamond that it is a commodity. When it serves as a use-value, asthetic or mechanical, on the breast of a harlot, or in the hand of a glasscutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity.”

— Karl Marx

206. “The heart of a man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet.”

— Karl Marx

207. “Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.”

— Karl Marx

208. “Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.”

— Karl Marx

209. “Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.”

— Karl Marx

210. “Bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.”

— Karl Marx

211. “Advances in science help to delegitimize the rule of kings and the power of the Church.”

— Karl Marx

212. “One capitalist always kills many.”

— Karl Marx

213. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

— Karl Marx

214. “The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.”

— Karl Marx

215. “If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.”

— Karl Marx

216. “The way people get their living determines their social outlook.”

— Karl Marx

217. “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the “value-forming substance”, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.”

— Karl Marx

218. “The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.”

— Karl Marx

219. “A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.”

— Karl Marx

220. “The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.”

— Karl Marx

221. “In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

— Karl Marx

222. “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille.”

— Karl Marx

223. “The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.”

— Karl Marx

224. “The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”

— Karl Marx

225. “The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”

— Karl Marx

226. “In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”

— Karl Marx

227. “The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.”

— Karl Marx

228. “The unity is brought about by force .”

— Karl Marx

229. “The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.”

— Karl Marx

230. “The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.”

— Karl Marx

231. “All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice.”

— Karl Marx

232. “Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.”

— Karl Marx

233. “The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.”

— Karl Marx

234. “In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.”

— Karl Marx

235. “While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.”

— Karl Marx

236. “It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.”

— Karl Marx

237. “In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.”

— Karl Marx

238. “But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in union. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.”

— Karl Marx

239. “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.”

— Karl Marx

240. “The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy .”

— Karl Marx

241. “Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.”

— Karl Marx

242. “Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.”

— Karl Marx

243. “Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.”

— Karl Marx

244. “And as for the Jews, who since the emancipation of their sect have everywhere put themselves, at least in the person of their eminent representatives, at the head of the counter-revolution – what awaits them?”

— Karl Marx

245. “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.”

— Karl Marx

246. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones.”

— Karl Marx

247. “Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.”

— Karl Marx

248. “It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expedience of capital punishment could be founded in a society glorying in its civilization.”

— Karl Marx

249. “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”

— Karl Marx

250. “The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

— Karl Marx