Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Karl Marx Philosopher

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: Germany
  • Born: May 5, 1818
  • Died: Mar 14, 1883

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. He is one of the founders of sociology and social science. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. After his studies he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne and began to work out the theory of the materialist conception of history. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he began writing for other radical newspapers and met Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1849 he was exiled and moved to London together with his wife and children, where he continued writing and formulating his theories about social and economic activity.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

History does nothing it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

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.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

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

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.