Karl Heinrich Marx was born on the 5th of May, 1818 in Trier, Germany. He was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Karl Marx published ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and ‘Das Kapital,’ anticapitalist works that form the basis of Marxism.
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 in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels. Karl Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and his work has been both lauded and criticised. He died on the 14th of March, 1883 in London, United Kingdom.
In this article, you will find a collection of famous Karl Marx quotes and sayings.
80 Karl Marx Quotes About Life, Communism & Religion
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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 Quote
“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“I am nothing but I must be everything.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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 Quote
“Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“This class has always to sacrifice a part of itself in order not to be wholly destroyed.”― Karl Marx Quote
“The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Nobody — not even “a musician of the future” — can live upon future products.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“To say that “the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital”, means only this: that the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him, the greater will be the number of workers than can be called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent upon capital be increased.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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 Quote
“Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world… of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“If you love without evoking love in return – if through the vital expression of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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 labor of others by means of such appropriation.
It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”― Karl Marx Quote
“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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 Quote
“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 Quote
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” ― Karl Marx Quote
“If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state” ― Karl Marx Quote
“As individuals express their life, so they are.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would -be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“…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.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The heart of a man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The new era differs from the old chiefly in that the lash begins to imagine itself possessed of genius.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity” ― Karl Marx Quote
“They are my slaves [ books and papers ] and they must serve me as I please.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.24” ― Karl Marx Quote
“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.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Everyone of our relationships with nature and man must be a definite expression of our real, individual life.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“atheism” … reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man.”― Karl Marx Quote
“Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” ― Karl Marx Quote
“Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.” ― Karl Marx Quote
