Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital.
His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory. Marx’s critical theories about society, economics and politics, collectively understood as Marxism, hold that human societies develop through class struggle. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised.
His work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx’s work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.
Some of the best quotes from Karl Marx are listed below.
- “A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations. The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression.” – Karl Marx
- “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!” – Karl Marx
- “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” – Karl Marx
- “Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren’t his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he’s lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.” – Karl Marx
- “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” – Karl Marx
- “Democracy is the road to socialism.” – Karl Marx
- “Favourite motto … De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].” – Karl Marx
- “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.” – Karl Marx
- “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” – Karl Marx
- “History is the judge — its executioner, the proletarian.” – Karl Marx
- “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” – Karl Marx
- “I am a machine condemned to devour books.” – Karl Marx
- “I am nothing but I must be everything.” – Karl Marx
- “Landlords like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.” – Karl Marx
- “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries unite!” – Karl Marx
- “Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor.” – Karl Marx
- “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.” – Karl Marx
- “Moments are the elements of profit” – Karl Marx
- “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.” – Karl Marx
- “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.” – Karl Marx
- “Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.” – Karl Marx
- “Political Economy regards the proletarian … like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.” – Karl Marx
- “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.” – Karl Marx
- “Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.” – Karl Marx
- “Religion is the opium of the masses.” – Karl Marx
- “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” – Karl Marx
- “Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.” – Karl Marx
- “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” – Karl Marx
- “Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.” – Karl Marx
- “The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.” – Karl Marx
- “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” – Karl Marx
- “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions” – Karl Marx
- “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” – Karl Marx
- “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.” – Karl Marx
- “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.” – Karl Marx
- “The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.” – Karl Marx
- “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” – Karl Marx
- “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.” – Karl Marx
- “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” – Karl Marx
- “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” – Karl Marx
- “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” – Karl Marx
- “The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” – Karl Marx
- “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.” – Karl Marx
- “The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.” – Karl Marx
- “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” – Karl Marx
- “The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” – Karl Marx
- “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” – Karl Marx
- “To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.” – Karl Marx
- “To be radical is to grasp things by the root.” – Karl Marx
- “You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.” – Karl Marx
