Karl Marx
I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Tired
A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: 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?Collection: Party
I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.Collection: Attitude
In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.Collection: Country
The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism. . . . The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system.Collection: Tools
[T]he task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of today's practice of life, the summit of which is the money system.Collection: Essence
Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)Collection: July
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, posses however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.Collection: Class
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.Collection: Men
But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.Collection: Law
[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.Collection: Mean
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.Collection: Mean
The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.Collection: Commodity
If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.Collection: Wigs
Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.Collection: About Money
I am a machine condemned to devour books.Collection: Reading
The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.Collection: Country