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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, Revolutions, Revolution

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

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

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: Jews, Religion, Judaism

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, Writers, Art, Creativity

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

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: Communism, Socialism, Ability

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politics, Politicians

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 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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Writers

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

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

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

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

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

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politicians, Politics

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

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

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Communism, Socialism

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Health

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

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.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
—Karl Marx

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *