Quotes from Karl Marx

A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. If a palace rises besides the little house, the little house shrinks into a hut.

The Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population

Whereas in the earlier forms of the family men never lacked women, but, on the contrary, had too many rather than too few, women had now become scarce and highly sought after. Hence it is with the pairing marriage that there begins the capture and purchase of women-wide-spread symptoms, but no more than symptoms, of the much deeper change that had occurred.

The working men have no country... national differences and antagonisms between people are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the modes of production and to the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

It is not social consciousness that determines social being, but social being that determines social consciousness.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

The history of all hitherto existing society2 is the history of class struggles.

The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.

has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest

Para cultivarse espiritualmente con mayor libertad, un pueblo necesita estar exento de la esclavitud de sus propias necesidades corporales, no ser ya siervo del cuerpo.

O casamento burguês é, na realidade, um sistema de esposas em comum, portanto, quando muito, poder-se-ia censurar aos comunistas por desejarem introduzir um sistema abertamente legalizado de amor livre, em substituição a um hipocritamente escondido.