Karl Marx Quotes

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

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.

The philosopher, who is himself an abstract form of alienated man, sets himself up as the measure of the alienated world.

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism.

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 of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.

As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.10

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.

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.

the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Lincoln's place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.