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

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

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: Isolation, Solitude

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

Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
Karl Marx

In every stock-jobbing swindle, everyone knows that the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold.
Karl Marx

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
Karl Marx
Topics: Work

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

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Karl Marx

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
Karl Marx
Topics: Happiness, Experience

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

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

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: Ability, Socialism, Communism

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.
Karl Marx
Topics: Politics

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
Karl Marx
Topics: World

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

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

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Karl Marx

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

Follow your own path, no matter what people say.
Karl Marx
Topics: Self-Discovery

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

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
Karl Marx
Topics: Individuality

Nothing has changed in Russias policy. Her methods, her tactics, her maneuvers may change, but the pole starworld dominationis immutable.
Karl Marx
Topics: Nations, Nationalism, Nationality, Nation

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
Karl Marx
Topics: Philosophy, Science

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

Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
Topics: Religion

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.
Karl Marx
Topics: Revolutionaries, Revolution, Revolutions

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

Constant revolutionizing of production distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Karl Marx

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

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