Karl Marx

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Poor Boniface! You are constipated with your holy thoughts and reflections, since you can no longer relieve yourself in speech and writing! O admirable victim of profundity! O pious constipation!

I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest.

If you want to be consistent in your aesthetic criticism, then forbid also a too serious and too modest investigation of the truth, for too great seriousness is the most ludicrous thing of all, and too great modesty is the bitterest irony.

History is thorough and goes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy.

This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase.

Has a real taler any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.

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

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

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

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.

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list – the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.

May the devil take these peoples movements, especially when they are 'peaceful'.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

The worker becomes a commodity all the more vile as he creates more goods. The more the world of things increases in value, the more the world of men devalues itself; one is a direct result of the other.

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

For him, the solution of present-day problems does not consist in public action but in the dialectical rotations of his brain.