Quotes from Karl Marx

Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist

Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

To the capitalist, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury.

It is one of the greatest misapprehensions to speak of free, human, social labour, of albour without private property. Labour by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity, determined by private property and creating private property. Hence the abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is concieved as the abolition of labour .

Martin] Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.

All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.

Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.

Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, here dance!

to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticise after dinner...

No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind

he bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

They are my slaves [ books and papers ] and they must serve me as I please.

The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

Pekerja tidak selalu mendapatkan apa yang dihasilkan oleh kapitalis, tetapi suah pasi akan turut jatuh ketika kapitalis mrngalami kerugian. Sehingga pekerja tidak mendapatkan apapun ketika kapitalis menjaga harga barang di atas harga alaminya baik itu melalui jasa perdagangan atau produksi rahasia, ataupun melalui monopoli

Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.

Not in vain does it [the proletariat] go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.

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.