674 Quotes by Karl Marx

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

Man makes religion, religion does not make man

The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism. . . . The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.

The religious world is but a reflex of the real world.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.