Karl Marx quotes - page 12

The commodity is first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production. (Karl Marx)
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. View quote
Karl Marx
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. View quote
Karl Marx
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state. View quote
Karl Marx
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. View quote
Karl Marx
The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got. View quote
Karl Marx
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. (Preface to the French edition). View quote
Karl Marx
Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex. View quote
Karl Marx
Considering the optimistic turn taken by world trade AT THIS MOMENT...it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of 'notables' to Petersburg as such a beginning. ... [O]n the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. View quote
Karl Marx
There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom,, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience. View quote
Karl Marx
The democratic concept of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept holds that ... each man is a sovereign being. This is the illusion, dream, and postulate of Christianity. (Karl Marx)
Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. View quote
Karl Marx
The knell of capitalist private property sounds. View quote
Karl Marx
In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue. View quote
Karl Marx
His latest proclamation, which is drafted in the same style, the manifesto abolishing slavery, is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution. View quote
Karl Marx
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created. View quote
Karl Marx
The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital... View quote
Karl Marx
Where speculation ends - in real life - there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. View quote
Karl Marx
If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. View quote
Karl Marx
Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. View quote
Karl Marx
The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world! (Karl Marx)
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. View quote
Karl Marx
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. View quote
Karl Marx
Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses – the sense of having. View quote
Karl Marx
When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes. View quote
Karl Marx