Karl Marx

Karl Marx
Karl Marxwas a philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Prussia to a middle-class family, he later studied political economy and Hegelian philosophy. As an adult, Marx became stateless and spent much of his life in London, England, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and published various works, the most well-known being the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. His work has since influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth5 May 1818
CityTrier, Germany
CountryGermany
Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.
The essence of the free press is the reliable, reasonable and moral nature of freedom.
[T]he task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity of today's practice of life, the summit of which is the money system.
All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.
Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are... the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomena
Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.
The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite.
Constant revolutionizing of production distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism.
When we bought this house, we designated this room the library,
It is not "history" which uses men as a means of achieving -- as if it were an individual person -- its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.