Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The burgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization.”

— Karl Marx

252. “I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.”

— Karl Marx

253. “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.”

— Karl Marx

254. “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

256. “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

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

— Karl Marx

258. “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

259. “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

260. “Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.”

— Karl Marx

261. “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

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

— Karl Marx

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Karl Marx

280. “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

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

— Karl Marx

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

286. “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

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

289. “Ignorance never yet helped anybody.”

— Karl Marx

290. “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

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

293. “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

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

— Karl Marx

295. “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

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

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

298. “Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

300. “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.”

— Karl Marx