Karl Marx Quotes

Quotes by and about Karl Marx

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Marx: "Philosophy is to science as masturbation is to sex."

[Addressing a critic:]
Marx: "Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks [like you] who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!"

Marx: "I admire [Darwin's theory] because it serves as a basis in the natural sciences for the class struggle."

Marx: "Do not make Heraclitus pay for being the most succinct of philosophers by [burdening him] with prolix commentaries."

Marx: "I [am] tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness ... bowing and scraping ... and hair-splitting over words."

Marx: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness."

Marx: "[In predicting the future] it is possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case ... I have ... worded my proposition so as to be right either way."

Marx: "In family life, the man is the bourgeois while the woman plays the role of the proletariat."

Marx: "Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste."
("If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.")

Marx: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as farce."

Bertrand Russell: "[Like] Hegel, [Marx] was a believer ... in a rational formula summing up the [entire] evolution of mankind."

Bertrand Russell: "His thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred."

Vladimir Lenin: "It is impossible to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without first having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later, none of the Marxists has understood Marx!"

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee."

Giuseppe Mazzini: "[Marx is] a destructive spirit ... extraordinarily sly, shifty and taciturn. Marx is very jealous ... against his political rivals and opponents he is vindictive and implacable; he does not rest until he has beaten them down."

Giuseppe Mazzini: "His overriding characteristic is boundless ambition and thirst for power. Despite the communist egalitarianism which he preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party ... and he tolerates no opposition."

Niall Ferguson: "Marx ... was an odious individual. An unkempt scrounger and a savage polemicist, he liked to boast that his wife was 'née Baroness von Westphalen', but nevertheless sired an illegitimate son by their maidservant. On the sole occasion when he applied for a job (as a railway clerk) he was rejected because his handwriting was so atrocious. He sought to play the stock market but was hopeless at it. For most of his life he therefore depended on handouts from Engels, for whom socialism was a hobby, along with fox-hunting and womanizing; his day job was running one of his father's cotton factories in Manchester. ... No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton."

Niall Ferguson: "[Marx] changed the world - though [not] for the better."