Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Karl Marx (German Philosopher, Economist)

Karl Marx (1818–83,) fully Karl Heinrich Marx, was the German political philosopher and economist who founded modern communism. He was one of the most significant political theorists of modern times.

Born in Trier, Prussia (now Germany,) Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and history and philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was a gifted student who made friends with many of the leading German-speaking philosophers of the time. By his late 20s, he was expressing himself as a communist and frequently engaged in heated debates with fellow scholars. Marx traveled around France, Belgium, and Germany during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and eventually settled in London starting 1849.

Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels became his closest intellectual collaborator and the source of much of the money with which Marx lived. They teamed up to write the epoch-making Communist Manifesto (1848) and elaborated their political principles in the three-volume Das Kapital. They published the first volume in 1867; Engels completed and published the remainder after Marx’s death (1885, 1894.)

The intellectual father of twentieth-century socialism, Marx’s ideas of indifference for the individual, denial of human nature, and rejection of the basic economics principles inspired some of the world’s murderous regimes—those of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro. In Marx’s name, millions of people were divested of their freedom, subjected to imprisonment and torture, sent to labor camps, or executed by firing squads.

Marx’s influence persists—his diagnosis of many of capitalism’s most significant flaws is still prescient. Many affluent countries have progressive income taxes, universal public education, and other principles that Marx espoused in Communist Manifesto. He continues to motivate liberals who emphasize the deprivation of capitalism as a class struggle in which the ruling-class minority takes advantage of the working-class majority while sharing little of the proceeds of wealth.

Marx is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Only 11 people came to his funeral. His monument now gets daily visitors, including followers of Marxist theory, who have made the tomb a place of pilgrimage. The pedestal is inscribed with quotes from Marx’s works—the front features the final words of Communist Manifesto, “Workers of all lands unite.”

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Karl Marx

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Communism, Socialism

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Capitalism

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Nature

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politics

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Shopping

Get out of here and leave me alone. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough already.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Speaking

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand
—Karl Marx
Topics: Religion

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science, Medicine

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism, Ability, Communism

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Capitalism

All I know is I’m not a Marxist.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Communism, Socialism

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Art, Authors & Writing, Writers, Creativity

From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism

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
Topics: Government

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Misery, Capitalism, Money

I am greatly pleased with the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Solitude, Isolation

All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Money

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History

Reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Reason

From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Judaism, Religion, Jews

Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism.
—Karl Marx

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Wealth, Riches

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Culture

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science, Philosophy

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Value, Values

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History

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.”
—Karl Marx
Topics: Intelligence

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Philosophy, One liners

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