Famous Marx Quotes
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Marx is famous for having said the following quotes:

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Miscellaneous Marx Quotes

"I am not a Marxist."
"Democracy is the road to socialism."
"Despite all its shortcomings, this Constitution looms against the background of Russian, Prussian and Austrian barbarism as the only work of liberty which Eastern Europe has ever created independently, and it emerged exclusively from the privileged class, from the nobility. The history of the world has never seen another example of such nobility of the nobility."
on the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791
"Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
Marx's purported last words
"I do not like money, money is the reason we fight."
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them."
"The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production."
"The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs."
"Religion is the opiate of the masses."
"You will!"
Apocryphal retort to a heckler asking who would clean the floors after the revolution.

Famous quotes from The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx

The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  • "The proletarians of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries: Unite!"
  • "The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
  • "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones."
  • "It [the bourgeosie] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous 'cash payment'."
  • "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
  • "A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Communism."
  • "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."
  • "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."
  • "But every class struggle is a political struggle."
  • "Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudicies, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois intrests."
  • "All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives meraly to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the intrest to the ruling class requires it."
  • "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."
  • "The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development invloves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas."
  • "The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got."
  • "Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class."
  • "No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he recives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc."
  • "In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
  • "A class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increase capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a comodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."

  • "He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistance that he requires for his maintenance."

Famous Quotes from the Das Kapital - Karl Marx

Das Kapital (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy) (1867)
  • "The commodity is first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man’s need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production"
I, 1, 126
  • "Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs."
  • "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."
    • Volume I, Chapter 7
  • "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
    • Volume I, Chapter 10
  • "Die Technologie enthüllt das aktive Verhalten des Menschen zur Natur, den unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesss seines Lebens, damit auch seiner gesellschaftlichen Lebensverhältnisse und der ihnen entquellenden geistigen Vorstellungen."

    • English: "Technology discloses the active relation of man towards nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life, and thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, of his own mentality, and his images of society, too."
    • Das Kapital Volume I, Chapter 13: "Machinery and Big Industry"
  • "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer."
    • Volume I, Chapter 13 (last sentence)
  • "The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities."
    • Volume II, Chapter 10

 

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