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Karl Marx

240 quotes

• “Thus heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, Is chosen for hell.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1837 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Pale Maiden” (1837) ballad

• “With disdain I will throw my gauntlet”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843), after the Prussian government dissolved the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was the editor.

• “Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843)

• “Indessen ist das gerade wieder der Vorzug der neuen Richtung, daß wir nicht dogmatisch die Welt antizipieren, sondern erst aus der Kritik der alten Welt die neue finden wollen. ... Ist die Konstruktion der Zukunft und das Fertigwerden für alle Zeiten nicht unsere Sache, so ist desto gewisser, was wir gegenwärtig zu vollbringen haben, ich meine die rücksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden, rücksichtslos sowohl in dem Sinne, daß die Kritik sich nicht vor ihren Resultaten fürchtet und ebensowenig vor dem Konflikte mit den vorhandenen Mächten.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843)

• “The only possible solution which will preserve Germany's honor and Germany's interest is, we repeat, a war with Russia.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Volume 7, March to December 1848, p. 304. Friedrich Engels. The Frankfurt Assembly Debates the Polish Question. Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 70, August 9, 1848.

• “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretirt; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1845 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Theses on Feuerbach" (1845), Thesis 11, Marx Engels Selected Works,(MESW), Volume I, p. 15; these words are also engraved upon Marx’s grave.

• “Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1847 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Writing in the Chartist newspaper (1847), in Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 6, pg 290.

• “[T]he very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna," Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 7 November 1848.

• “Did you not read our articles about the June revolution, and was not the essence of the June revolution the essence of our paper? Why then your hypocritical phrases, your attempt to find an impossible pretext? We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung (18 May 1849)Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, Vol. VI, p. 503,

• “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Chapter 3 (1850)

• “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1850 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League in London, March 1850

• “From your letter it would seem that, during your old man's visit to Manchester, you did not hear that a second document had appeared in the Kölnische Zeitung under the heading 'Der Bund der Kommunisten'. This was the piece we wrote jointly, 'Ansprache an den Bund'—au fond, nothing less than a plan of campaign against democracy.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1844 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Karl Marx: Letter to Engels, July 13, 1851, Marx and Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 38, Letters 1844-51, Great Britain, Lawrence & Wishart, Electric Book, 2010, p. 384

• “As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1852 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Friedrich Engels (4 February 1852), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 39. Letters 1852–55 (2010), p. 32

• “Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords?”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1853 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Forced Emigration," New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853.

• “[B]y quarrelling amongst themselves, instead of confederating, Germans and Scandinavians, both of them belonging to the same great race, only prepare the way for their hereditary enemy, the Slav.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1853 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Eastern Question: A Reprint of Letters written 1853 –1856 dealing with the events of the Crimean War, edit., Eleanor Marx Aveling, London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co. (1897) p. 90

• “England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1853 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, 10 June 1853.

• “England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia… When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch… and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1853 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, 08 August 1853

• “What do you think of the aspect of the money market? … This time, by the by, the thing has assumed European dimensions such as have never been seen before, and I don't suppose we'll be able to spend much longer here merely as spectators. The very fact that I've at last got round to setting up house again and sending for my books seems to me to prove that the 'mobilisation' of our persons is AT HAND.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1856 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Friedrich Engels (26 September 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856–59 (2010), pp. 71–72

• “There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1857 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: In an article written for the New York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1857

• “Considering the optimistic turn taken by world trade AT THIS MOMENT…it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of 'notables' to Petersburg as such a beginning. … [O]n the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1856 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Friedrich Engels (8 October 1858), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856–59 (2010), pp. 346–347

• “The position of the revolutionary party in Germany is certainly difficult at the moment, but, with some critical analysis of the circumstances, clear nevertheless. As to the "governments," it is obvious from every point of view, if only for the sake of Germany's existence, that the demand must be put to them not to remain neutral, but, as you rightly say, to be patriotic. But the revolutionary point is to be given to the affair simply by emphasising the antagonism to Russia more strongly than the antagonism against Boustrapa.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1846 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Friedrich Engels (18 May 1859), quoted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895 (1943), p. 122

• “The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1861 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Addenda, "Relative and Absolute Surplus Value" in Economic Manuscripts (1861-63)

• “[T]he Jewish Nigger, Lassalle… It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1862 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels (Letter, July 30, 1862) in reference to his socialist political competitor, Ferdinand Lassalle. MECW Volume 41, p. 388; first published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, S…

• “We are obviously heading for revolution—something I have never once doubted since 1850. The first act will include a by no means gratifying rehash of the stupidities of '48-'49. However, that's how world history runs its course, and one has to take it as one finds it.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1860 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (28 December 1862), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860–64 (2010), p. 437

• “This much is certain, the ERA OF REVOLUTION has now FAIRLY OPENED IN EUROPE once more. And the general state of affairs is good.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1860 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Friedrich Engels (13 February 1863), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860–64 (2010), p. 453

• “I have just noticed in the 2nd edition of The Times that the Prussian Second Chamber has finally done something worthwhile. We shall soon have revolution.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1860 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Friedrich Engels (21 February 1863), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860–64 (2010), p. 461

• “Mit allen ihren Mängeln erscheint diese Konstitution mitten in der russisch−preußisch−österreichischen Barbarei als das einzige Freiheitswerk, das Osteuropa je selbständig hervorgebracht hat. Und sie ging ausschließlich von der bevorrechteten Klasse, dem Adel, aus. Die Weltgeschichte bietet kein andres Beispiel von ähnlichem Adel des Adels.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1791 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791.

• “The uncritical way in which he has treated his subject will become evident from one single remark. He pleads against a rise of wages or against high wages as the result of such a rise.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1865 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Value, Price and Profit, a short book intended to be a refutation of John Weston, a member of the First International who had criticized the rise in wages. (June 20 and 27, 1865)

• “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).”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1868 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, dated 12 December 1868.

• “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.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1869 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Abolition of Landed Property Letter to Robert Applegarth (3 December 1869)

• “Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Civil War in France : "The Third Address" (May 1871)

• “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1875 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to W. Bracke (5 May 1875)

• “Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. A proof of this is for example, that, because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries with which I was pestered during the existence of the International to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Remarks against personality cults from a letter to W. Blos (10 November 1877).

• “Ramsgate is full of Jews and fleas.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1879 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: MEKOR IV, 490 (25 August 1879)

• “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) first seen 1882 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Marx quoted and translated by Engels (in an 1882 letter to Eduard Bernstein) about the peculiar Marxism which arose in France 1882. Original: "Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste

• “[The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection … If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [Dichter], but never a perfected, a truly great man.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: in Karl Marx and World Literature (1976) by S. S. Prawer, p. 2.

• “Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration. But reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition. He tumbles where his vehement drive calls him; no longer does he choose his position, but rather chance and luster determine it.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We cannot always choose the vocation to which we believe we are called. Our social relations, to some extent, have already begun to form before we are in a position to determine them.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 37

• “When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38

• “Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38

• “When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 39

• “Prometheus ist der vornehmste Heilige und Märtyrer im philosophischen Kalender.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Das Philosophisch-Werden der Welt [ist] zugleich ein Weltlich-Werden der Philosophie; ihre Verwirklichung [ist] zugleich ihr Verlust.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem, when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root, but for man the root is man himself. The clear proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its political energy, is that it proceeds from the decisive positive abolition of religion.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted from David McLellan, Marx before Marxism, MacMillan, 1980, p. 150.

• “The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man, hence the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being—conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs: 'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!'”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The god of practical need and self-interest is money. … 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. Part 2”

  Karl Marx (1818–1883) said by 1883 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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