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Karl Marx Quotes
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290 Quotes on Communism, Religion, Love, and the Human Condition

Discover the profound and thought-provoking words of Karl Marx, the renowned philosopher and economist. Explore his famous quotes that delve into the essence of communism, religion, love, and the human condition. Uncover the revolutionary ideas that have shaped our understanding of society and its structures.

Karl Marx was a renowned German philosopher, economist, and political theorist who made significant contributions to various fields. He is best known for his works, The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, which analyze capitalism using his theory of historical materialism. These ideas, collectively known as Marxism, have had a profound impact on intellectual, economic, and political history.

Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied philosophy at prestigious universities before receiving his doctorate in 1841. Influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he critiqued and expanded upon Hegelian ideas in his writings. In Paris, Marx met Friedrich Engels with whom he formed a lifelong friendship and collaboration. They actively participated in the Communist League and authored The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Facing expulsion from Belgium and Germany, Marx moved to London where he wrote influential works like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Das Kapital. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, he discussed revolution, the transition to communism, and the role of the state. Marx played a critical role in founding the International Workingmen's Association but died stateless in 1883.

Marx's theories emphasize class conflict as a driving force behind societal development. According to him, capitalists and workers are engaged in constant struggle due to opposing interests in control over production means versus labor power exchange for wages within capitalism. Using historical materialism as an analytical tool, Marx predicted that tensions within capitalism would eventually lead to its downfall and replacement by socialism. He advocated for organized revolutionary action by the working class to bring about socio-economic emancipation and establish a communist society free from class divisions. Marx's work has faced both praise and criticism but has undeniably influenced socialist thought, political movements worldwide, and modern social sciences.

✵ 5. May 1818 – 14. March 1883  •  Other names Karol Marx
Karl Marx photo
Karl Marx: 290 quotes304 likes

Karl Marx Quotes

“But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet makers, thrown on the streets?”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 6, pg. 479.
(Buch I) (1867)

“Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning. Although Lincoln does not possess the grandiloquence of historical action, as an average man of the people he has its humour.”

Karl Marx

Comments on the North American Events (1862)

“Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 19, pg. 594.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is below all calculation.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 2, pg. 430.
(Buch I) (1867)

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

Karl Marx

" The British Rule in India http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm," New York Daily Tribune, 10 June 1853.

“The object before us, to begin with, material production.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 3, first text page, first line.

“Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.”

Karl Marx

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. III, 30.

“When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.”

Karl Marx

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

“As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Rent of Land, p. 66.
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

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

Karl Marx

The Criticism of the Gotha Program (1875)
Variant: Variant translation: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

“In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. III, Ch. I, Cost Price and Profit, p. 39.
Das Kapital (Buch III) (1894)

“The object of art — like every other product — creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 12.

“Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 58.

“Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 3, Section 1, pg. 116.
(Buch I) (1867)

“What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 30.

“The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 14.

“It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average, that he will wash himself.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Source: Das Kapital (Buch II) (1893)

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

Karl Marx

Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm in London, March 1850

“The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.”

Karl Marx

Source: (Buch I) (1867) Vol. I, ch.1, section 4.

“The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”

Karl Marx

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

“[The career a young man should choose should be] one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection … If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [Dichter], but never a perfected, a truly great man.”

Karl Marx

in Karl Marx and World Literature (1976) by S. S. Prawer, p. 2.
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

“Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.”

Karl Marx

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook II, The Chapter on Money, p. 141.

“In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 5, pg. 296.
(Buch I) (1867)

“Everyone has a goal which appears to be great, at least to himself, and is great when deepest conviction, the innermost voice of the heart, pronounces it great. … This voice, however, is easily drowned out, and what we thought to be inspiration may have been created by the fleeting moment and again perhaps destroyed by it. … We must seriously ask ourselves, therefore, whether we are really inspired about a vocation, whether an inner voice approves of it, or whether the inspiration was a deception, whether that which we took as the Deity’s calling to us was self-deceit. But how else could we recognize this except by searching for the source of our inspiration?”

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)

“Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.”

Karl Marx book The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature

Prometheus ist der vornehmste Heilige und Märtyrer im philosophischen Kalender.
The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature (1841)

“But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 24, Section 4, pg. 657.
(Buch I) (1867)

“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.”

Karl Marx

Addenda, "Relative and Absolute Surplus Value" in Economic Manuscripts (1861-63)

“To discover the various use of things is the work of history.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 1, pg. 42.
(Buch I) (1867)

“Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.”

Karl Marx

Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 474 (See also...David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ch. VII, p. 81).
(Buch II) (1893)

“As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 14, Section 5, pg. 396.
(Buch I) (1867)

“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”

Karl Marx

Often attributed to Lenin or Stalin, less often to Marx. According to the book, "They Never Said It", p. 64, the phrase derives from a rumour that Lenin said this to one of his close associates, Grigori Zinoviev, not long after a meeting of the Politburo in the early 1920s, but there is no evidence that he ever did. Experts on the Soviet Union reject the rope quote as spurious.
Misattributed

“The labour-power is a commodity, not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.”

Karl Marx

Vol. II, Ch. XIX, p. 384.
(Buch II) (1893)

“Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?”

Karl Marx

(1857/58)
Source: (Bastiat and Carey), pp. 809–810.

“All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.”

Karl Marx

Section 2, paragraph 20, lines 9-13.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“Despite all its shortcomings, this Constitution looms against the background of Russo-Prusso-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.”

Karl Marx

Mit allen ihren Mängeln erscheint diese Konstitution mitten in der russisch−preußisch−österreichischen Barbarei als das einzige Freiheitswerk, das Osteuropa je selbständig hervorgebracht hat. Und sie ging ausschließlich von der bevorrechteten Klasse, dem Adel, aus. Die Weltgeschichte bietet kein andres Beispiel von ähnlichem Adel des Adels.
On the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791.
"Poland, Prussia and Russia" (1863 manuscript). In Werner Conze and Dieter Hertz-Eichenrode (ed.) Manuskripte über die polnische Frage (1863-1864). Hague: Mouton, 1961.

“Democracy is the road to socialism.”

Karl Marx

Attributed to Marx in recent years, including in Communism (2007) by Tom Lansford, p. 48, but the earliest occurrence of this yet located is in The Communist Review (1952) by the Communist Party of Great Britain, p. 15, where it is used to characterize the Communist agenda.
Disputed

“In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.”

Karl Marx

Vol. I, Ch. 23, pg. 633.
(Buch I) (1867)

“We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Preface to the First Edition, Capital Volume 1, Peinguin Classics edition 1976.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

“Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.”

Karl Marx

Section 2, paragraph 34-35
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

"Communism. The Production of the Form of Intercourse Itself",
The Marx-Engels Reader
The German Ideology (1845/46)

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”

Karl Marx

Section 2, paragraph 25.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

“For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests the common interest of all the members of society, that is, sality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

"Concerning the production of Consciousness"
The German Ideology (1845/46)

“In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Source: The German Ideology (1845/46), pp. 188

“Manufacture was all the time sheltered b protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Source: The German Ideology (1845/46), pp. 183

“Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but is it nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Part One
Source: The German Ideology (1845/46), The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 187

“He who can buy bravery is brace, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for anyone specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 105, The Marx-Engels Reader

“Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society"
Source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 105, The Marx-Engels Reader

“When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical processing its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is on mere phase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"The Meaning of Human Requirements"
Source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p.99-100,The Marx-Engels Reader

“In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will com to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character a well as of the goal of this historical movement - and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 99, The Marx-Engels Reader

“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering.”

Karl Marx book On the Jewish Question

What is his worldly God? Money.
On the Jewish Question (1843)