Quotes from Karl Marx

History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred.

Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change it.

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

Ignorance never yet helped anybody.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

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

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

Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression.

All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

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

If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.

Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled.

The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.

I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.

There are no bigger donkeys than these workers.... Look at our 'craftsmen'; Sad that world history should be be made with such people.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.