Marx Quotes

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.

Humor is reason gone mad.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [These words are also inscribed upon his grave]

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well I have others.

What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.

I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong.

If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere.

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.

Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.

While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.

Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, and I'm going to be happy in it.

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

I have nothing but respect for you -- and not much of that.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know.

I intend to live forever, or die trying.

A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously.

Just give me a comfortable couch, a dog, a good book, and a woman. Then if you can get the dog to go somewhere and read the book, I might have a little fun.

Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men -- the other 999 follow women.

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while

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

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries unite!

She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.

Why, look at me. I've worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.

Time wounds all heels.

I am free of all prejudices. I hate every one equally.

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.

Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.

The only real laughter comes from despair.

I am nothing but I must be everything.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

Marriage is a wonderful institution...but who wants to live in an institution?

If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.

Room service? Send up a larger room." [A Night at the Opera]

But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.

I’ll put off reading Lolita for six more years until she turns 18.

I must admit, I was born at an early age.

Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

What's everyone talking about?" "The end of The Iliad." "That's the best part," Marx said. "Why is it the best part?" Sadie asked. "Because it's perfect," Marx said. "'Tamer of horses' is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn't have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.

Do you mind if I don't smoke?

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

Here's to our wives and girlfriends...may they never meet!

Groucho: You know I think you're the most beautiful woman in the world? Woman: Really? Groucho: No, but I don't mind lying if it gets me somewhere.

I've been looking for a girl like you - not you, but a girl like you.

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary

I think women are sexy when they got some clothes on. And if later they take them off then you've triumphed. Somebody once said it's what you dont see you're interested in, and this is true.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

A man is only as old as the woman he feels.

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

Don't look now, but there's one man too many in this room, and I think it's you.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Policeman: "A hermit eh? Then why's your table set for four?" Groucho: "That's nothing. My alarm clock is set for eight.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says "yes" you know he is a crook.

Of course, during the centuries the justice was always a rather elastic term, but always till now and “everywhere the justice is the same thing – the usefully for the stronger” (Plato, The Republic).

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.

Karl Marx got a bum rap. All he was trying to do was figure out how to take care of a whole lot of people. Of course, socialism is just “evil” now. It’s completely discredited, supposedly, by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I can’t help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to communist China now, which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are. You talk about the collapse of communism or the Soviet Union. My goodness, this country collapsed in 1929. I mean it crashed, big time, and capitalism looked like a very poor idea.

Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

This acute, “a selfdissolving contradiction,” Marx had very precisely seen and foreseen that “it establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference.” This contradiction “reproduces a new financial aristocracy” (how much Marx was right!), no matter it will call itself Communist Party of Soviet Union or DuPont Financial Circle. It reproduces “a new variety of parasites . . . , a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation.

Still, in 1877, Engels wanted to protect us from false socialism. Still then, in Anti-Dühring, he wrote that not any nationalization is socialist, because in the contrary case both Bismarck and Napoleon would have to be arranged among the founders of socialism.

Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit." Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. "Can you believe our luck?" Max said. "We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit!" Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had hey just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.

… the primitive comprehension that the state property represents a social one, their identification, and their equalization  could not resist the criticism of the time. The state property is not socialism. The state-monopoly property, as it was on the both sides of the Berlin Wall and which continues to be such one even after it dropped down, is not social property. There was never and nowhere any socialism! In the twentieth century, we passed through a system of utopian socialism as proof that this was not socialism that was not possible, but the utopia of the writers before Marx and after Marx. We were visited by a utopian socialism, which at the contemporary stage is simply capitalism—state, monopolistic.

Just like the myth of the people’s or popular capitalism, which was propagated since the mid1950s in the countries to the west of Berlin Wall, to the east and the north of it, since the same time it was introduced the myth of the people’s or popular socialism. But the suggestion is always the same. Under any “people’s” power—from people’s capitalism to people’s socialism—the greatest illusion suggested to the oppressed classes is that the people are sovereign, i.e., that all the people dominate over themselves. In this respect, even John Kenneth Galbraith makes Marxist conclusions, which even in the Internet epoch have the same power: “Young people are suggested that in a democracy the entire power belongs to the people!” (“The Anatomy of Power”) Yet, old people know that this is not true!

Like a gloomy and sinister paradox since its apparition until now, socialism suffered terrible and terrifying metamorphoses. With the name of the most human doctrine—Socialism—the most ominous and naughty crimes against humanity were done. The National Socialism of Hitler created Auschwitz and Majdanek and the People’s socialism of Stalin — Gulag and Kolima! And both of them buried more than fifty million people! That’s monstrous!

There is no word that admits of more various significations, and has made more varied impressions on the human mind, than that of liberty.” (Montesquieu) In order to exist, liberty and justice in a society, there should be equality in this society before them and together with them. Only then can we speak of humanism. Only socially equal personalities are free. And only free and equal in rights personalities could “love each other like brothers.

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact. I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power. II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world... Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The dream of all peoples—a world without weapons, a world without wars—despite any initiatives, no matter whether they are strategic or not, is only a utopia within the contemporary content of the State. Nowadays, the State is the biggest, the most powerful criminal organization of continuous robbery of social labor. The State is a mafia today, in which the basic principle is the “law” omertá—“who’s not mum, is dead!” Now the State is the final phase of the organized criminality. It is “a conspiracy of the rich” (Thomas More), where because of the judicial astrology, “in every situation, powerful rogues know how to save themselves at the expense of the feeble” (Jean-Jacque Rousseau). Until now, the class society represents a power of one family that divided for itself the state as private property!