Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!
Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused.
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.
The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.
Defining by a general law the expenditures on the…school….is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.
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.
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Workingmen of all countries unite!
No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind
Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
Men [sic] 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.(Marx, 1963)
The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
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.
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.
Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps
[representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,
One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie.
He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.
What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.
As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.
The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.
The ‘free’ laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.
Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.
Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.
Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.
But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.
Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.
The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.
Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren’t his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he’s lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.
Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it
Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it
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
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Capital is dead labor that vampirelike lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it suck.
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.
The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries 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.
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.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
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.
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
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.
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
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.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
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.
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 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.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
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.
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.
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
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.
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.