Our list of Karl Marx Quotes
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
(3 minutes read)
The Karl Marx's quote says that the most prominent thoughts and ideas come from those with the most power in society.
Economic, social, and labor needs and situations shape thinking. Those who are at the top and have power can shape ideas and thoughts as they wish because they are unchallengeable.
We must have our ideas and thoughts. These do not have to depend on the statements of public opinion, the ruling class, or whoever has greater authority over us.
Above all, we must be aware of our surroundings. Also, we should be skeptical about everything said by those with greater power because it does not have to be correct and uncontested.
To counter the opinion of the ruling class with an idea or thought of our own, we have to elevate ourselves and get to the same level as them. The ruling class will no longer have the power to control us or cover up our opinions. We can achieve this if we believe in ourselves and reach our goals.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
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Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
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Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.
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The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
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The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
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Democracy is the road to socialism.
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Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
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The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
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Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!
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From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
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The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
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Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
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The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
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Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
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Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
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Religion is the opium of the masses.
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If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
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Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
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Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
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Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
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Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
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The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
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The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
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Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
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In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
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The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
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The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
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Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
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We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.
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Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
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The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.
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Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
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Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
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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.
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Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
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History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
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While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
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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.
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For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
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Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
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The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
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On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.
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The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
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The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
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A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
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Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
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Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
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The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
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Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
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It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
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A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
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In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
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The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
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The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
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It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
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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.
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There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.
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Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
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The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
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Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
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The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.
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Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
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I am nothing but I must be everything.
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To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
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Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!
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It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
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The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.
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Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
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There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
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If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?
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