Karl Marx: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 8, pg. 520.
(Buch I) (1867)

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

Karl Marx

Die Natur baut keine Maschinen, keine Lokomotiven, Eisenbahnen, electric telegraphs, selfacting mules etc. Sie sind Produkte der menschlichen Industrie; natürliches Material, verwandelt in Organe des menschlichen Willens über die Natur oder seiner Betätigung in der Natur. Sie sind von der menschlichen Hand geschaffene Organe des menschlichen Hirns; vergegenständliche Wissenskraft. Die Entwicklung des capital fixe zeigt an, bis zu welchem Grade das allgemeine gesellschaftliche Wissen, knowledge, zur unmittelbaren Produktivkraft geworden ist und daher die Bedingungen des gesellschaftlichen Lebensprozesses selbst unter die Kontrolle des general intellect gekommen, und ihm gemäß umgeschaffen sind.
(1857/58)
Source: Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 626.

Life , Nature , Knowledge

“Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was, thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 4(e), pg. 742.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

Animals

“If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.”

Karl Marx

Letter to Robert Applegarth (3 December 1869)
Source: The Abolition of Landed Property http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1869/12/03.htm (3 December 1869)

Nature , Parting

“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.”

Karl Marx book The Holy Family

The Holy Family, Ch. VI (1845).

Men , History , Personality

“Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 686.
(Buch I) (1867)

“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.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 2, pg. 49.
(Buch I) (1867)

Clothes

“Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration. But reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition. He tumbles where his vehement drive calls him; no longer does he choose his position, but rather chance and luster determine it.
Then we are not called to the position where we can most shine. It is not the one which, in the long succession of years during which we may hold it, will never make us weary, subdue our zeal, or dampen our inspiration. Soon we shall see our wishes unfulfilled and our ideas unsatisfied.”

Karl Marx

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 36
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

Idea , Chance , Success

“I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.”

Karl Marx

Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
(Buch I) (1867)

Thinking , Learning

“But simultaneously with the development of capitalist production the credit system also develops. The money-capital which the capitalist cannot as yet employ in his own business is employed by others, who pay him interest for its use.”

Karl Marx

Vol. II, Ch. XVII, p. 325.
(Buch II) (1893)

Money , Business

“For capitalism is abolished root and branch by the bare assumption that it is personal consumption and not enrichment that works as the compelling motive.”

Karl Marx

Denn der Kapitalismus ist schon in der Grundlage aufgehoben durch die Voraussetzung, daß der Genuß als treibendes Motiv wirkt, nicht die Bereicherung selbst.
Vol. II, Ch. IV, p. 123.
(Buch II) (1893)

Motivation , Personality

“Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences.”

Karl Marx

Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
(Buch I) (1867)

Science

“In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite the high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beet-root sugar, and potato spirits.”

Karl Marx

Section 3, paragraph 9.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

Love , Life , Truth

“Reason nevertheless prevails in world history.”

Karl Marx

Comments on the North American Events (1862)

World , History

“b>England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia… When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch… and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

Karl Marx

“The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, 08 August 1853

People , Drink

“It is in fact not the consciousness dominating life but the very life dominating consciousness.”

Karl Marx

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. III, 27.

Life

“Your favourite virtue … Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man … Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman … Weakness
Your chief characteristic … Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness … To fight
Your idea of misery … Submission
The vice you excuse most … Gullibility
The vice you detest most … Servility
Your aversion … Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation … Book-worming
Favourite poet … Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer … Diderot
Favourite hero … Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine … Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower … Daphne
Favourite colour … Red
Favourite name … Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish … Fish
Favourite maxim … Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me, Terence]
Favourite motto … De omnibus dubitandum”

Karl Marx

Everything must be doubted
Marx's replies to a set of questions given to him by his daughters Jenny and Laura in 1865 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/04/01.htm

Books , Flowers , Idea , Fish

“It is impossible to persue this nonsense any further.”

Karl Marx

(1857/58)
Source: (Bastiat and Carey), p. 813 (last text page, second last line).