101 Important Communist Manifesto Quotes From Karl Marx

Georgia Stone
Dec 12, 2023 By Georgia Stone
Originally Published on Feb 16, 2021
Edited by Luca Demetriou
The Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz
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Read time: 16.7 Min

In this article, we have listed influential Karl Marx's' The Communist Manifesto' quotes.

Karl Marx was a philosopher, author, social theorist, and economist. Marx’s theories about capitalism and communism are extremely popular.

'The Communist Manifesto was originally the 'Manifesto Of The Communist Party. It is a political document written in 1848 by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The Communist League commissioned it and was originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, 'The Communist Manifesto was later recognized as one of the world’s most influential political documents.

'The Communist Manifesto' holds some compelling quotes by Karl Marx. Marx opens with "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism". Please ensure to check them out down below, especially if you are studying!

If you like this article, make sure you also check out Kant quotes and Ludwig Wittgenstein as you finish with this one.

Important Communist Manifesto Quotes From Karl Marx

One of the most famous quotes from 'The Communist Manifesto' is "working men of all countries, unite! ", and this motto still enjoys great popularity among followers of the great communist thinker.

Communist thinking typically concerns the abolition of private property and the redistribution of wealth. Here are a few 'Communist Manifesto' quotes from Karl Marx pertaining to the class struggle and class conflict prevailing in the society.

Karl Marx,a German philosopher at wax museum

1. “Modern productive forces are revolting against the modern conditions of production. Commercial crises, due, ironically, to over-production, are threatening the existence of bourgeois society. Productive forces are now fettered by bourgeois society, and these crises represent this tension." - Karl Marx.

2. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” - Karl Marx.

3. “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletariat parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” - Karl Marx.

4. “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." - Karl Marx.

5. “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 fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” - Karl Marx.

6. “Thy 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.” - Karl Marx.

7. “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.” - Karl Marx.

8. “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” - Karl Marx.

Karl Marx Communism Quotes

Views of Karl Mark are still popular in various parts of Europe and Asia. He propagated the distribution of political power properly. This led to the creation of various working-class parties across the world. Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, believes that capitalism will eventually self-destruct. Here are some of the best Karl Marx quotes from 'The Communist Manifesto'.

9. “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” - Karl Marx.

10. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” - Karl Marx.

11. “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that is does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.” - Karl Marx.

12. “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.” - Karl Marx.

13. “You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” - Karl Marx.

14. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” - Karl Marx.

15. “In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.” - Karl Marx.

16. “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.” - Karl Marx.

Quotes From Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx is one of the most well known thinkers in the world. His class quotes and quotes about the bourgeoisie still hold value for many. Here are some of the best quotes from 'The Communist Manifesto from the famous Karl Marx.

17. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”- Karl Marx.

18. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” - Karl Marx.

19. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” - Karl Marx.

20. “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.” - Karl Marx.

21. “The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour.

Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products.

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” - Karl Marx.

22. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." - Karl Marx

23. “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” - Karl Marx

24. “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” - Karl Marx

25. “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.” - Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

26. “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." - Karl Marx

27. "Workingmen of all countries unite!” - Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

28. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” - Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

29. 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.” - Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

30. “Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.” - Karl Marx

31. “I am nothing but I must be everything.” - Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

32. “To be radical is to grasp things by the root.” - Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

33. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” - Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Karl Marx Philosophy Quotes

34. “Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.” - Karl Marx

35. “The proletarians have nothing to loose but their chains. They have a world to win.” - Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

36. “Democracy is the road to socialism.” - Karl Marx

37. “The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.” - Karl Marx

38. “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” - Karl Marx

39. “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” - Karl Marx

40. “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.” - Karl Marx

41. “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” - Karl Marx

42. “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.” - Karl Marx

43. “History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.” - Karl Marx

44. “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’.

It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” - Karl Marx

45. “History is the judge — its executioner, the proletarian.” - Karl Marx

46. “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.” - Karl Marx

47. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” - Karl Marx

48. “Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.” - Karl Marx

49. “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.” - Karl Marx

50. “Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.” - Karl Marx

51. “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!” - Karl Marx

52. “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” - Karl Marx

53. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” - Karl Marx

54. “The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” - Karl Marx

55. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” - Karl Marx

56. “To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.” - Karl Marx

57. “Religion is the opium of the masses.” - Karl Marx

58. “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” - Karl Marx

59. “Favourite motto … De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].” - Karl Marx

60. “I am nothing but I must be everything.” - Karl Marx

61. “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.” - Karl Marx

62. “I am a machine condemned to devour books.” - Karl Marx

63. “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question.” - Karl Marx

64. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” - Karl Marx

65. “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions” - Karl Marx

66. “The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.” - Karl Marx

67. “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” - Karl Marx

68. “You must be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.” - Karl Marx

69. “The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.” - Karl Marx

70. “Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren’t his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he’s lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.” - Karl Marx

71. “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

72. “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!” - Karl Marx

73. “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” - Karl Marx

74. “Political Economy regards the proletarian … like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.” - Karl Marx

75. “Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor.” - Karl Marx

76. “Moments are the elements of profit” - Karl Marx

77. “The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” - Karl Marx

78. “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” - Karl Marx

79. “Landlords like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.” - Karl Marx

80. “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.” - Karl Marx

81. “Take away a nation’s heritage and they are more easily persuaded.” – Karl Marx

82. “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.” – Karl Marx

83. If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.” – Karl Marx

84. “Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine.” – Karl Marx

85. “All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.” – Karl Marx

86. "Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters." – Karl Marx

87. "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits." – Karl Marx

88. "A few days in my old man’s factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked. ..., it is impossible to carry on communist propaganda on a large scale and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry." – Karl Marx

89. "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." – Karl Marx

90.

"For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones."

– Karl Marx

91. "As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist." – Karl Marx

92.

"Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and ... the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, ... a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."

– Karl Marx

93. "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question." – Karl Marx

95. "The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society." – Karl Marx

96. "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist." – Karl Marx

97. "A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence.

But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain." – Karl Marx

98. "What is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action." – Karl Marx

 99. "But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point.

In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade." – Karl Marx

100. "The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party. – Karl Marx

101. "Working men of all countries unite!” - Karl Marx.

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Written by Georgia Stone

Bachelor of Arts specializing in French with Film Studies, Bachelor of Arts (Year Abroad) specializing in Literature, History, Language, Media, and Art

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Georgia StoneBachelor of Arts specializing in French with Film Studies, Bachelor of Arts (Year Abroad) specializing in Literature, History, Language, Media, and Art

Georgia is an experienced Content Manager with a degree in French and Film Studies from King's College London and Bachelors degree from Université Paris-Sorbonne. Her passion for exploring the world and experiencing different cultures was sparked during her childhood in Switzerland and her year abroad in Paris. In her spare time, Georgia enjoys using London's excellent travel connections to explore further afield.

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