Quotes from Karl Marx

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.

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

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

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

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.

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

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

There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

The intellectual desolation, artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines.

When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.

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

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

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.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If it be useless, the labor contained in it is useless, cannot be reckoned as labor, and cannot therefore create value.

Medicines heal doubts as well as diseases.

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

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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

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.