The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
— Karl Marx
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
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.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
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.
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.
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Religion is the opium of the masses.
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
Democracy is the road to socialism.
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.
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.
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.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
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.
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
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.
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.
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
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.
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 history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
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.
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
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.
The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.
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.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
