Top 400 Karl Marx Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.”

— Karl Marx

302. “It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

— Karl Marx

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

— Karl Marx

304. “All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature.”

— Karl Marx

305. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe.”

— Karl Marx

306. “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

307. “As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.”

— Karl Marx

308. “Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.”

— Karl Marx

309. “Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.”

— Karl Marx

310. “You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.”

— Karl Marx

311. “The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”

— Karl Marx

312. “Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces.”

— Karl Marx

313. “To the capitalist, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury.”

— Karl Marx

314. “History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.”

— Karl Marx

315. “Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.”

— Karl Marx

316. “When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

— Karl Marx

317. “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”

— Karl Marx

318. “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

— Karl Marx

319. “This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.24.”

— Karl Marx

320. “Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.”

— Karl Marx

321. “The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.”

— Karl Marx

322. “That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.”

— Karl Marx

323. “Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.”

— Karl Marx

324. “Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the ‘ever needy’ man?”

— Karl Marx

325. “There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.”

— Karl Marx

326. “Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an “assault upon society,” and is branded as “Socialism.”

— Karl Marx

327. “The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.”

— Karl Marx

328. “Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.”

— Karl Marx

329. “As capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse.”

— Karl Marx

330. “The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body.”

— Karl Marx

331. “When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.”

— Karl Marx

332. “Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.”

— Karl Marx

333. “Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.”

— Karl Marx

334. “The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

— Karl Marx

335. “It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.”

— Karl Marx

336. “It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.”

— Karl Marx

337. “A people which subjugates another people forges its own chains.”

— Karl Marx

338. “On the basis of capitalist production, a new swindle with the wages of management develops in connection with joint-stock companies, in that, over and above the actual managing director, a number of governing and supervisory boards arise, for which management and supervision are in fact a mere pretext for the robbery of shareholders and their own enrichment.”

— Karl Marx

339. “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

340. “As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone .”

— Karl Marx

341. “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.”

— Karl Marx

342. “In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

— Karl Marx

343. “I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.”

— Karl Marx

344. “But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.”

— Karl Marx

345. “In our reflecting and reasoning age, a man is not worth much who cannot give a good reason for everything, no matter how bad or crazy. Everything in the world that has been done wrong, has been done wrong for the very best of reasons.”

— Karl Marx

346. “In 1642 the modern world was born.”

— Karl Marx

347. “Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.”

— Karl Marx

348. “The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.”

— Karl Marx

349. “I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.”

— Karl Marx

350. “If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.”

— Karl Marx