Karl Marx
Although usury is itself a form of credit in its bourgeoisified form, the form adapted to capital , in its pre-bourgeois form it is rather the expression of the lack of credit .Collection: Expression
Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.Collection: Memories
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.Collection: Revenge
Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.Collection: Substance
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.Collection: Class
Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.Collection: House
In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians.Collection: Country
As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone .Collection: Hands
A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.Collection: Greatness
It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.Collection: Independent
The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.Collection: Mind
We cannot tell by looking at the diamond that it is a commodity. When it serves as a use-value, asthetic or mechanical, on the breast of a harlot, or in the hand of a glasscutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity.Collection: Hands
I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.Collection: Book
All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.Collection: Essence
Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.Collection: Men
Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.Collection: Men
Advances in science help to delegitimize the rule of kings and the power of the Church.Collection: Kings
The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.Collection: Past
The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.Collection: Ends
The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.Collection: Character
All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.Collection: Real
[Napoleon] swept away everywhere the establishments of feudality. ... [He was] Caesar himself.Collection: Swept Away
An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.Collection: Mean
The most interesting acquaintanceship I have struck up here is that of Colonel Lapinski. He is without doubt the cleverest Pole - besides being an homme d'action [man of action] - that I have ever met. His sympathies are all on the German side, though in manners and speech he is also a Frenchman. He cares nothing for the struggle of nationalities and only knows the racial struggle. He hates all Orientals, among whom he numbers Russians Turks, Greeks, Armenians, etc., with equal impartiality.... His aim now is to raise a German legion in London.Collection: Hate
The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.Collection: Art
These numerous points at which money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated in numerous individual hoards or potential money-capitals appears as so many obstacles to circulation, because they immobilise the money and deprive it of its capacity to circulate for a certain time.Collection: Obstacles
The rule of the bourgeois democrats [in pre-federal Germany], from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destructionCollection: Germany
An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.Collection: Art
The English Established Church... will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income.Collection: Church
The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.Collection: Joints
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.Collection: Reality
2 is a proletariat prime, but 4, 6 and 8 are also composite proletariats. Composites of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains!Collection: World
History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.Collection: Real
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.Collection: Individual
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.... The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.Collection: Home
The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.Collection: Determination
Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.Collection: Real
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.Collection: Ideas
In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.Collection: Reality
So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.Collection: Long
The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.Collection: Raw Materials
The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.Collection: Long
...the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789... gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.Collection: Communication
So in Jewry we recognise a contemporary universal anti-social phenomenon, which has reached its present pitch through a process of, historical development in which the Jews have zealously co-operated. And this evil anti-social aspect of Jewry has grown to a stage at which: it must necessarily collapse.Collection: Evil
In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred.Collection: Philosophy
The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not gotCollection: Country
The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.Collection: Powerful
Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.Collection: White