Quote collection
414 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling class are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society."
"Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world."
"All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital , and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it."
"In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians."
"Be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things."
"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature."
"Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive."
"Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity."
"Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases."
"While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser."
"A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish."
"Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle."
"History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy."
"Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)"
"The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity ."
"The leading princes are the most servile tools of English despotism. . . . The native princes are the stronghold of the present abominable English system."
"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."
"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe."
"All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature."
"The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living."