Quotes from Karl Marx

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

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.

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.

In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

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

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

The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.

If you love without evoking love in return - if through the vital expression of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

I am a machine condemned to devour books.

Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.

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.

Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world... of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!

Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.