Karl Marx Quotes Page 2

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

“The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.”

“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.”

“You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.”

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

“I am nothing but I must be everything.”

“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

“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.”

“Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!”

“As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.”

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.”

“Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.”

“Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”

“Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”

“Moments are the elements of profit.”

“Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.”

“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.”

“What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.”

“Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.”

“For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.”

“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

“Bourgeois society continuously brings forth the Jew from its own entrails.”

“Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.”

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

“Man was not liberated from religion, but gained religious freedom. He was not liberated from property, but gained freedom of property. He was not liberated from the selfishness of the profession, but gained the freedom of the profession.”

“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.”