Karl Marx
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.Collection: Force
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.Collection: Men
The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.Collection: Flower
Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.Collection: Money
...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.Collection: Communication
Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.Collection: Dream
...the 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.Collection: Communication
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.Collection: Change
Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.Collection: Class
With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.Collection: Giving
If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.Collection: Mean
In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.Collection: Class
The weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons.Collection: Criticism
And as for the Jews, who since the emancipation of their sect have everywhere put themselves, at least in the person of their eminent representatives, at the head of the counter-revolution -- what awaits them?Collection: Revolution
Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.Collection: Men
Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.Collection: Mean
Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.Collection: Substance
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.Collection: Historical
The criticism of Religion is the beginning of all criticismCollection: Criticism
The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity .Collection: Doe
The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.Collection: Men
The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.Collection: Work
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Collection: Giving Up
Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic race at all, they are des intrus [intruders], who must be chased back across the Dnieper, etc.Collection: Russia
The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.Collection: Passion
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.Collection: Bourgeoisie
Music is the mirror of reality.Collection: Reality
There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.Collection: Suicide
Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?Collection: Men
One capitalist always kills many.Collection: Capitalist
The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.Collection: Love
The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.Collection: Generations
Philosophy is to science as masturbation is to sex.Collection: Sex
Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.Collection: Gold
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.Collection: Fall
If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.Collection: Capitalist
Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Real
Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Class
The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.Collection: Past
In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.Collection: Responsibility
Religion is the opium of the people translated from the German Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkessometimes misquoted as opiate of the people.Collection: People
To discover the various use of things is the work of history.Collection: Use
Hazrat Mahal, Begum of Oudh, during the national liberation uprising of 1857-59 in India headed the rebels.Collection: Uprising
All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.Collection: Intellectual
The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.Collection: Philosophy
In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.Collection: Fall
Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.Collection: Hair