Quotes from Karl Marx

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

Men make their own history

The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.

The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that . . . each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity.

Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.

Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.

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

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.

Man makes religion, religion does not make man

Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.

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

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