Karl Marx Quotes

German-born philosopher (1818-1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German political philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for labor theory of value, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published many works during his lifetime, including The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the first volume of Das Kapital (1867), the two later volumes being completed by his collaborator Friedrich Engels.

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Pen Names: Glückskind

Alternative Names: Karl Heinrich Marx • Karl H. Marx • Marx

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Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

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.

Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in land-division, namely, equality. In the same way association also re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man.

The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value.

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.

An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.

Ser radical é tomar as coisas pela raiz. Mas, para o homem, a raiz é o próprio homem.

Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.

But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.

It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.

Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein.

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.