Quotes About Power

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

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.[106] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[107] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.

Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

The interpenetration of pre-capitalist, semi-capitalist and capitalist relations of production, imposed upon colonies and semi-colonies by the power of capital on the world market and the violence of foreign political and military domination, has been an extremely important factor in the historical development of these twin sources of money capital accumulation.

representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament

El poder político es simplemente el poder organizado de una clase para oprimir a otra.

Burjuva toplumunda, her insan?n meta al?c?s? olarak meta hakk?nda ansiklopedik bilgi sahibi oldu?u fictio juris'i (varsay?m?) egemendir.

Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. (Marx, 1963)

Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will.

For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.

Government hears only its own voice … It knows it hears only its own voice and yet it deceives itself that it hears the people's voice.

T]he various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for centuries afterwards.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has remained "poor," only "less poor" in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class "an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power," then it has remained relatively just as poor.

working day of this kind, which is formed by the succession of more or less numerous interrelated working days, I call a working period. If we speak of the working day, then we mean the length of time for which the worker must daily expend his labour-power, must work. If we speak of the working period, on the other hand, this means the number of inter-related working days that are required, in a

You preach to me constantly the gospel of 'saving' and 'abstinence'. Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it.

Democracy is the road to Socialism.

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.