Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it
~ Karl Marx
If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Capital is dead labor that vampirelike lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it suck.
All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.
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.
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.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
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.
Religion is the opium of the masses.
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
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.
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
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.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.
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.
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.
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
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.
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.
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
