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Connexions Quotations
Karl Marx
Quotes
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Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
- Karl Marx
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Capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value,
to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
- Karl Marx
Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)
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Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
- Karl Marx
The German Ideology
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Democracy is the road to socialism.
- Karl Marx
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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.
- Karl Marx
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The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.
– Karl Marx
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Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.
- Karl Marx
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For nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history,
and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; ...
At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry:
The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
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For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
- Karl Marx
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From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
- Karl Marx
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Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.
He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
- Karl Marx
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History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”,
it “wages no battles”. It is human beings, real, living human beings who do all that,
who possess and fight; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using human beings as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of human beings pursuing their aims.
- Karl Marx
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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. Production by an isolated individual outside society ...
is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.
- Karl Marx
Grundrisse
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Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.
- Karl Marx
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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I am not a ‘Marxist’.
- Karl Marx
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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.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production,
so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.
The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,
the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
- Karl Marx
The German Ideology
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In a higher phase of communist society ... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed
in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
- Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Program
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In every stockjobbing swindle every one 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.
Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.
Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.
- Karl Marx
Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10
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In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,
we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Communist Manifesto
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It is the duty of the press to come forward on behalf of the oppressed...
the first duty of the press now is to undermine all the foundations of the existing political state of affairs.
- Karl Marx
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No person combats freedom; at most they combat the freedom of others. Hence every kind of freedom has always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, at another as a universal right.
- Karl Marx
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On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects..
- Karl Marx
Capital, Volume I, Chapter 16
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The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt.
- Karl Marx
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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.
- Karl Marx
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A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”.
- Karl Marx
Theories of Surplus Value
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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
- Karl Marx
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The press lies continually and has to deny even any consciousness of lying, and must cast off all shame.
- Karl Marx
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Proletarian revolutions ... criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out...
Karl Marx, 1851
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Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
- Karl Marx
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
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Revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
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Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
- Karl Marx
Class Struggles in France
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The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
- Karl Marx
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Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be.
- Karl Marx
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Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
- Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)
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Some want a full censorship, others a half censorship; some want three-eighths freedom of the press, others none at all. God save me from my friends!
- Karl Marx
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There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.
- Karl Marx
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What is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action.
- Karl Marx
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Whenever a particular freedom is put in question, freedom in general is put in question.
- Karl Marx
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You cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences
- Karl Marx
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Read more about Karl Marx.
Also see the Marxism Gateway page.
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