Quotes from Karl Marx

Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Society is a sort of organism on the growth of which conscious efforts can exercise little effect.

The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.

Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.

There is no greater stupidity than for people...to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life.

This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

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

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

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.