Quotes from Karl Marx

Nobody — not even "a musician of the future" — can live upon future products.

It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expedience of capital punishment could be founded in a society glorying in its civilization.

Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces.

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the value-forming substance, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.

When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any.

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.

What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.

But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.

As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found his feet in the universe.

In 1642 the modern world was born.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

A silent, unavoidable revolution is taking place in society, a revolution THAT CARES AS LITTLE ABOUT THE HUMAN LIVES IT DESTROYS as an earthquake cares about the houses it ravages. Classes and RACES THAT ARE TOO WEAK to dominate the new conditions of existence WILL BE DEFEATED.

To say that the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capitalmeans only this; that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs that fall down to him, the greater number of workers that can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent on capital be increased.

Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.

Marx himself makes it clear that he does not start from a basic concept – value – but from an elementary material phenomenon – the commodity – which is at the basis of capitalism, as the only economic organization based upon generalized commodity production.

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them

Everyone of our relationships with nature and man must be a definite expression of our real, individual life.

What is crucial in the true state is not the fact that every citizen has the chance to devote himself to the universal interest in the shape of a particular class, but the capacity of the universal class to be really universal, i.e. to be the class of every citizen.

Self-contempt is a serpent that ever gnaws at one's breath, sucking the life-blood from one's own heart and mixing it with the poison of misanthropy and despair.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

The heart of a man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet.