Quotes from Karl Marx

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.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Religion is the opiate of the people.

The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.

He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.

Religion is the opium of the people.

Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.

My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

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

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I'll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. (Preface to the French edition).

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

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.