Karl Marx
Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.Collection: Men
Change the economic base and you will change human beings.Collection: Economic
Follow your own path, no matter what people say.Collection: Self
...the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.Collection: Communication
We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part.Collection: Play
The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that . . . each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity.Collection: Christian
I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.Collection: Wish
The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.Collection: Race
Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.Collection: Strong
The full man does not understand the wants of the hungryCollection: Men
A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.Collection: People
Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.Collection: Strong
The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.Collection: Slavery
This young lady, who instantly overwhelmed me with her kindness, is the ugliest creature I have seen in my entire life, with repulsive Jewish facial features.Collection: Kindness
All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.Collection: Transformation
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.Collection: Frustrated
Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it.Collection: California
The unity of the bourgeoisie can be shaken only by the unity of the proletariat.Collection: Unity
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.Collection: Independent
In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.Collection: Struggle
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Dog
Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.Collection: Men
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.Collection: Communication
Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.Collection: Country
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. (Preface to the French edition).Collection: Path
All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice.Collection: Peace
In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.Collection: Historical
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.Collection: War
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.Collection: Bourgeoisie
As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.Collection: Toil
Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds.Collection: Space
English law in 1572 decreed that beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless some one will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offense, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons.Collection: Years
Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.Collection: Cash
Nothing has changed in Russias policy. Her methods, her tactics, her maneuvers may change, but the pole starworld dominationis immutable.Collection: Russia
Religion is the balm of the people.Collection: People
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.Collection: Horse
The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value .Collection: Realizing
Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.Collection: Tasks
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.Collection: Needs
The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.Collection: Winning
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.Collection: Communist Manifesto
There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.Collection: Party
In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.Collection: Economics
If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.Collection: War
All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital , and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.Collection: Character
If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.Collection: Selfish
Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are... the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomenaCollection: Essence
If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one's back on hum suffering and look after one's own skin.Collection: Suffering