Karl Marx (born 5 May 1818, Trier, Germany – died 14 March 1883, London, United Kingdom) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Among modern thinkers, Marx is still very influential in the fields of political economy, sociology, and strands of heterodox economics.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.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.Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions.
Men 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 a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
Karl Marx
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.To be radical is to grasp things by the root.Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.I am nothing but I must be everything.There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.
Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
Karl Marx
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.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.Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things.The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.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 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.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.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.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.
Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list – the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.
Karl Marx
The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.Democracy is the road to socialism.Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.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.Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.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.Follow your own path, no matter what people say.
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?
Karl Marx
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
