Quotes from Karl Marx

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

History does nothing it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

What was new in what I did was: (1) to demonstrate that the existence of classes is tied only to definite historical phases of development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship is only a transition to the dissolution of all classes and leads to the formation of a classless society.

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

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

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.

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.

Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

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.

All great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice the fist time as tragedy, the second time as farce

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

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

Capital is money, capital is commodities.. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays golden eggs.

Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Men make their own history

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.

The past lies like a nightmare upon the present