Karl Marx citáty

page 9

„Potlačeným je raz za niekoľko rokov dovolené rozhodnúť sa, ktorých konkrétnych predstaviteľov utláčanej triedy si zvolia, aby ich reprezentovali a potláčali v parlamente.“

„Umenie je najvyššia radosť, ktorú človek dáva sám sebe.“

„Skúsenosť nám ukazuje, že najnešťastnejší je ten, kto priniesol šťastie najväčšiemu počtu ľudí.“

„Akí sú ľudia, taká je aj diskusia.“

„Iba ten národ je slobodný, ktorý neberie slobodu iným národom.“

„Náboženstvo je ópium ľudstva.“

„Vo voľnom čase ľudia jednak oddychujú a jednak sa venujú vznešenejším záľubám, ktoré, pochopiteľne, robia z človeka nový subjekt.“

„Zdá sa, že takou mierou, akou si človek podrobuje prírodu, je podrobovaný inými ľuďmi alebo vlastnou nízkosťou.“

„Ľudské dejiny sú dejinami individuálneho vývoja ľudí.“

„Pravdy nepoznajú hranice politického zemepisu.“

„Bolo by, pravda, veľmi pohodlné robiť svetové dejiny, keby sa zápas podstupoval len s podmienkou neklamne priaznivých vyhliadok.“

„Každý začiatok je ťažký - táto pravda platí pre všetky veky.“

„Pravdivý má byť nielen výsledok skúmania, ale aj cesta k nemu. Samé skúmanie pravdy musí byť pravdivé.“

„Boh nie je nič iné, než povýšenie ľudských vlastností do dokonalých rozmerov, je to len výplod fantázie.“

„Účel, ktorý potrebuje nesprávne prostriedky, nemôže byť správny.“

„Muž je len taký starý ako žena, do ktorej je zaľúbený.“

„Filozofi doteraz svet vysvetľovali, ide však o to: zmeniť ho.“

„Sloboda je poznaná nutnosť.“

„Človek by mal byť tým, čím by mohol byť.“

„Blahobyt spoločnosti má dva zdroje - prácu a prírodu.“

„Ak človek pracuje len pre seba, môže sa stať znamenitým učencom, veľkým mudrcom, slávnym básnikom, ale nikdy sa nemôže stať veľkým človekom.“

„Ak použijem na dobrý cieľ zlé prostriedky, prestáva byť cieľ dobrý.“

„Byrokracia miluje iracionálnosť a v tom je sestrou teológie.“

„Proletári všetkých krajín, spojte sa!“

„Keby nebolo tých, ktorí tvoria hodnoty, nebolo by ani čo kradnúť.“

„Robotnícka trieda v revolúcii nemôže nič stratiť. Len až svoje okovy, ale získať môže celý svet.“

„Manželstvo sa nemôže podriaďovať zvôli, ale zvôľa sa musí podriaďovať manželstvu.“

„Tvorivá práca je ako plameň, je vážnym a veľmi zaujímavým napätím.“

„Triedny boj nevyhnutne vedie k diktatúre proletariátu.“

„Nešťastie nikdy nechodí samo.“

„Byrokracia miluje iracionálnosť.“

„Byť radikálny znamená uchopiť vec u koreňa. Koreňom človeka je však sám človek.“

„Dočasné odlúčenie je dobré. Aj veže sa zdajú z blízka prikrčené, pričom malé a všedné veci príliš narastajú ak ich pozorujeme bez odstupu. Aj s citmi je to tak.“

„Filozofi tento svet len interpretovali, čo je však rozhodujúce, to je jeho premena.“

„Najväčším životným nebezpečenstvom pre každú bytosť je, že stráca seba samého. Preto je nesloboda vlastným smrteľným nebezpečenstvom pre človeka.“

„Nestačí, keď myšlienka usiluje o uskutočnenie, skutočnosť sama musí usilovať o myšlienku.“

„Poslaním umenia je nielen zjemňovať existujúce zmysly človeka, ale vytvárať zmysly nové.“

„Pre byrokrata je svet obyčajným objektom jeho úradného výkonu.“

„Rozvod nie je nič iného než vyhlásenie - toto manželstvo je zosnulé manželstvo, jeho existencia je len zdanie a klam.“

„Trápia nás nielen živí, ale i mŕtvi.“

„Žena musí byť predovšetkým pekná a muž silný.“

“Despite all its shortcomings, this Constitution looms against the background of Russo-Prusso-Austrian barbarism as the only work of liberty which Eastern Europe has ever created independently, and it emerged exclusively from the privileged class, from the nobility. The history of the world has never seen another example of such nobility of the nobility.”

“Democracy is the road to socialism.”

“In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.”

“We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!”

“Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.”

“Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.”

“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.”

“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 interests the common interest of all the members of society, that is, sality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.”

“In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.”

“Manufacture was all the time sheltered b protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.”

“Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but is it nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.”

“He who can buy bravery is brace, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for anyone specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.”

“Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy.”

“When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical processing its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is on mere phase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”

“In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will com to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very severe and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have gained beforehand a consciousness of the limited character a well as of the goal of this historical movement - and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.”

“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering.”

“The Jewish Nigger, Lassalle… It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger).”

“This much is certain, the ERA OF REVOLUTION has now FAIRLY OPENED IN EUROPE once more. And the general state of affairs is good.”

“We are obviously heading for revolution—something I have never once doubted since 1850. The first act will include a by no means gratifying rehash of the stupidities of '48-'49. However, that's how world history runs its course, and one has to take it as one finds it.”

“As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.”

“Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude (of the others). Feuerbach’s great achievement is: (1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of the theory; (3) His opposing of the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.”

“The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

“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. … (1) What is the meaning, in the development of mankind, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labor? (2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and thereby improve the situation of the working class, or — like Proudhon — see equality of wages as the goal of social revolution?.”

“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.”

“It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. What proves beyond doubt the radicalism of German theory, and thus its practical energy, is that it begins from the resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being—conditions which can hardly be better described than in the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a proposed tax upon dogs: 'Wretched dogs! They want to treat you like men!'”

“The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital…
The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i.e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour...
The mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.”

“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.”

“Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.”

“Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.”