Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.”

— Karl Marx

252. “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

— Karl Marx

253. “No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind.”

— Karl Marx

254. “Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.”

— Karl Marx

255. “The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.”

— Karl Marx

256. “The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.”

— Karl Marx

257. “The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity .”

— Karl Marx

258. “But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. 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

259. “In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.”

— Karl Marx

260. “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

261. “For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.”

— Karl Marx

262. “Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.”

— Karl Marx

263. “A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.”

— Karl Marx

264. “The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.”

— Karl Marx

265. “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

266. “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.”

— Karl Marx

267. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps.”

— Karl Marx

268. “All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs.”

— Karl Marx

269. “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

270. “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”

— Karl Marx

271. “No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.”

— Karl Marx

272. “This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.”

— Karl Marx

273. “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.”

— Karl Marx

274. “An abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy .”

— Karl Marx

275. “Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list – the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.”

— Karl Marx

276. “On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.”

— Karl Marx

277. “If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.”

— Karl Marx

278. “Imperialism is da woist thing I ever hoid!”

— Karl Marx

279. “An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.”

— Karl Marx

280. “Those dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff will see that we’re the only chaps who haven’t been stultified by the ghastly period of peace.”

— Karl Marx

281. “Hazrat Mahal, Begum of Oudh, during the national liberation uprising of 1857-59 in India headed the rebels.”

— Karl Marx

282. “Jaminan kemerdekaan bangsa ialah pada kemerdekaan jiwa.”

— Karl Marx

283. “In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.”

— Karl Marx

284. “If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.”

— Karl Marx

285. “Marx’s father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son’s psychology.”

— Karl Marx

286. “If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one’s back on hum suffering and look after one’s own skin.”

— Karl Marx

287. “Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.”

— Karl Marx

288. “When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.”

— Karl Marx

289. “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”

— Karl Marx

290. “Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.”

— Karl Marx

291. “Ignorance never yet helped anybody.”

— Karl Marx

292. “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.”

— Karl Marx

293. “Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”

— Karl Marx

294. “As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital .”

— Karl Marx

295. “Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.”

— Karl Marx

296. “Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.”

— Karl Marx

297. “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.”

— Karl Marx

298. “Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.”

— Karl Marx

299. “The world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs.”

— Karl Marx

300. “Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois – for the benefit of the working class.”

— Karl Marx