12 Unmissable Quotes by Karl Marx

Very rarely do we get an opportunity to learn from one of the original founding fathers, the masters of that subject who knows what it means to 'understand'. Karl Heinrich Marx was one such accomplished master of political economics, history, and philosophy.

It takes a rare genius to see things the way they are and put forward original and radical solutions to problems. This, Marx did with elan and every sentence of his is filled with clarity and defiance.

Read on to know more from the master himself. (In these quotes, by 'bourgeoisie', Marx means the class who owns the means of production, i.e. the industrialists or merchants of today)

"I do not like money, money is the reason we fight."

"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 history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,...

....a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment" ...

...for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ...

...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."

"The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."

"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.....

...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."

"Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labor. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations."

"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. "

"In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims...

...They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

"Workers of the world, unite!"

"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the laborer."

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."