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Karl Marx Quotes (1818-1883)
Philosopher, Revolutionary
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About Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German political philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for labor theory of value, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published many works during his lifetime, including The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the first volume of Das Kapital (1867), the two later volumes being completed by his collaborator Friedrich Engels.
Best Karl Marx Quotes
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Karl Marx quotes.
“(That is it!)”
“One capitalist always kills many.”
“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”
“Reason nevertheless prevails in world history.”
“If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.”
“Die Ideen existieren nicht getrennt von der Sprache.”
“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”
“The devil take this wrong arithmetic. But never mind.”
“It is impossible to pursue this nonsense any further.”
Karl Marx Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of Karl Marx quotes by topic.
Karl Marx on Communism 9 quotes
View all 9 quotes on Communism →Karl Marx on Alienation 7 quotes
“Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence, this essence dominates him and he worships it.”
Karl Marx on Money 6 quotes
View all 6 quotes on Money →Karl Marx on Labor power 6 quotes
“Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.”
Karl Marx on Work 6 quotes
“The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.”
Karl Marx on Capitalism 5 quotes
“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor; And lives more by the labor it sucks.”
Karl Marx on Whigs (British political party) 5 quotes
“The Whigs as well as the Tories, form a fraction of the large landed property of Great Britain. Nay, the oldest, richest and most arrogant portion of English landed property is the very nucleus of the Whig party.”
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Karl Marx on Capital 4 quotes
“Capitals accumulate faster than population.”
Karl Marx on Productive forces 4 quotes
“On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital.”
Karl Marx on Reason 3 quotes
“Reason nevertheless prevails in world history.”
Karl Marx on Means of production 3 quotes
“If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.”
Karl Marx on Accelerationism 3 quotes
“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”
What Karl Marx Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Karl Marx shared regarding contemporaries.
Karl Marx on Baruch Spinoza 7 quotes
“Hegel's History of Philosophy presents French materialism as the realization of Spinozistic Substance, which in any case is more comprehensible than the "French school of Spinoza."”
Karl Marx on Abraham Lincoln 4 quotes
“Lincoln’s place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!”
Karl Marx on Edmund Burke 2 quotes
“Burke...is held by every party in England as the paragon of British statesmen.”
Karl Marx on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 2 quotes
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
Karl Marx on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 2 quotes
“Proudhon was the first to draw attention to the fact that the sum of the wages of the individual workers, even if each individual labour be paid for completely, does not pay for the collective power objectified in its product, that therefore the worker is not paid as a part of the collective labour power.”
Karl Marx on John Russell, 1st Earl Russell 2 quotes
“Colonial reforms, educational schemes, the "liberties of the subject", public press and public meetings, enthusiasm for war and yearning for peace—all of them were but false pretences for Lord John Russell. The whole man is one false pretence, his whole life a lie, all his activity a continuous chain of petty intrigues for the achievement of shabby ends—the devouring of public money and the usurpation of the mere semblance of power. No one has ever illustrated more strikingly the truth of the biblical words that no man can add one cubit unto his stature. Placed by birth, connections, and social accidents on a colossal pedestal, he always remained the same homunculus—a dwarf dancing on the tip of a pyramid. History has, perhaps, never exhibited any other man—so great in pettiness.”
Karl Marx on Edmund Spenser
“Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet.”
Karl Marx on Thomas Robert Malthus
“Capitals accumulate faster than population;”
Karl Marx on Carl von Clausewitz
Karl Marx on Frédéric Bastiat
“The shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics.”
Karl Marx on Josiah Tucker
“Tucker was a parson and a Tory, but, for the rest, an honourable man and a competent political economist.”
Karl Marx on Napoleon III
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Quotes About Karl Marx
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Karl Marx from others.
Preamble on Karl Marx 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Preamble →Section on Karl Marx 10 quotes
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
Paula Gunn Allen on Karl Marx
“The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free."”
Bettina Aptheker on Karl Marx
“Labor-power is a commodity sold by the worker in exchange for a "living wage." The worker, Marx insisted, "must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, as his own commodity, and this he can do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily: for a definite period of time. By this means alone, can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it."”
Raymond Aron on Karl Marx
“One cannot discuss a socialism which has built an enormous industry by reducing the standard of living of the masses and a capitalism which has raised the standard of living, reduced working hours, and permitted the consolidation of labor unions, as if there were the same realities that Marx considered a century ago or that he anticipated according to a system which has since been refuted by events.”
Kenneth Arrow on Karl Marx
“It can be maintained that Smith was a creator of general equilibrium theory, although the coherence and consistency of his work can be questioned. A fortiori, later systematic expositors of the classical system, such as Ricardo, J. S. Mill, and Marx, in whose work some of Smith’s logical gaps were filled, can all be regarded as early expositors of general equilibrium theory. Marx, in his scheme of simple reproduction, read in combination with his development of relative price theory in volumes 1 and 3 of Das Kapital, has indeed come in some ways closer in form to modern theory than any other classical economist, though of course everything is confused by his attempt to maintain simultaneously a pure labor theory of value and an equalization of rates of return on capital.”
Lee Atwater as quoted anonymously by Alexander Lamis on Karl Marx
“In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]… the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.”
Mikhail Bakunin on Karl Marx
“As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations… He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right.”
Angelica Balabanoff on Karl Marx
“I looked up to these Russians who could discuss by the hour the theories of Marx and Bakunin, who had participated in demonstrations and other revolutionary activity.”
Paul A. Baran on Karl Marx
“Much if not all we know about the complex mechanism responsible for the development (and stagnation) of productive forces, and for the rise and decay of social organizations, is the result of the analytical work undertaken by Marx and by those whom he inspired.”
Jacques Barzun on Karl Marx
“The strength of Marx is precisely that he shared the feelings of the downtrodden, that the prejudice of equality was in his very fiber, joined to the ambition and jealousy of power, which made him ready to destroy the present moral order in the name of a higher which he saw.”
Peter Beilharz on Karl Marx
“The power of Marx's diagnosis of modern times is not equalled by his prognosis. Marx shows a fundamental weakness in his attraction to populism, the image of two fundamental working classes, especially early. He installs the proletariat as the motor of history, an imputation which the proletariat never quite understands correctly. His sense of the permanent revolution of capital spills over into the telos of guaranteed socialism, which it never is. He was a powerful critic of capitalism as modernity, who understood the centrality of capital as a relation and as a self-naturalizing illusion. He was a dreamer. His intellectual origins were before modernity, but the scope of his vision was beyond it. His legacy is best imagined as what Ernst Bloch called the warm stream of marxism. Was he an original? Yes, and no. The power of Marx's work lies in the brilliant synthesis that he generated from the work of others, working within on the critical horizons of both the streams we conventionally separate as Enlightenment and Romanticism. Perhaps, in our own times, the fate of his thought is to return to the cultures from which it was initially created, as avant-garde returns, finally, to the mainstream.”
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Karl Marx that are questionable.
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Karl Marx
“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.”
“Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.”
“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.”
“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us.”
“If we were to hang the last capitalist, another would appear to sell us the rope.”
“Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”
About Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German political philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for labor theory of value, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published many works during his lifetime, including The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the first volume of Das Kapital (1867), the two later volumes being completed by his collaborator Friedrich Engels.