Marx Quotes

I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable. ~ Warren Buffett

We took pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed ... But we're going back next week. ~ Groucho Marx

Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities ("exploitation") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the wearisome old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact in the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labor-power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to counteract it is through a direct "terroristic imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal access to health services…), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments for the underprivileged). In short, the axiom of equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terroristic" equality) - it is a formalistic notion in a strict dialectical sense, that is, its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a ~ Slavoj Zizek

I can't wait to front my band with these new songs and play for fans, but I've decided to keep my day job too. ~ Richard Marx

The uneasy ghost of Marx must suffer the torments of the damned at the truth glaring from the pages of history that one does not abolish property by transferring it to the state. ~ Louis O. Kelso

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know. ~ Groucho Marx

Cultural creatives take a stand for a more spiritualized, personalized, and integrated culture. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

After Marx died, Engels denied that Marx had said that 'the economic element is the only determining one'. He and Marx, he conceded, were partly to blame for this misinterpretation, for they had emphasized the economic side in opposition to those who rejected it altogether. ~ Anonymous

With a little study you'll go a long ways, and I wish you'd start now ~ Groucho Marx

Music is the mirror of reality. ~ Karl Marx

Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things. ~ Karl Marx

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases. ~ Karl Marx

[Napoleon] swept away everywhere the establishments of feudality ... [He was] Caesar himself. ~ Karl Marx

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles. ~ Karl Marx

Don't be silly. I'll write you twice a week. ~ Groucho Marx

The wealthy man is the man whois much, not the one who has much ~ Karl Marx

Comedians are a much rarer and far more valuable commodity than all the gold and precious stones in the world. ~ Groucho Marx

Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they 'nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. ~ Tim Wu

When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote. ~ Tim O'Brien

Park hated football. He cried when his dad took him pheasant hunting. Nobody in the neighbourhood could ever tell who he was dressed as on Halloween. ('I'm Doctor Who.' 'I'm Harp Marx.' 'I'm Count Floyd.') And he kind of wanted his mom to give him blond highlights. ~ Rainbow Rowell

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes-indeed, deletes-the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

All I know is that I am not a Marxist. ~ Karl Marx

I'd like to meet the person who invented sex and see what they're working on now. ~ Groucho Marx

The gospel of St. Marx is just the old Judaeo-Christian mythology with the supernatural sanctions left out ~ Revilo P. Oliver

Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver. ~ Karl Marx

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. ~ Karl Marx

The typical entrepreneur is no longer the bold and tireless man of Marshall, or the sly and rapacious Moneybags of Marx, but a mass of inert shareholders, indistinguishable from rentiers, who employ salaried managers to run their concerns. ~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

The heart of a man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet. ~ Karl Marx

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other. ~ Karl Marx

But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. He said it was the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for people, and he wanted to get rid of it. But when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word "opium" wasn't simply metaphorical. Back then real opium was the only painkiller available, for toothaches or cancer of the throat, or whatever. He himself had used it. As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that, and certainly didn't want to abolish it. OK? He might have said today as I say tonight, "Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I'm so glad it works. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery. ~ Groucho Marx

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. ~ Karl Marx

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list
the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation. ~ Karl Marx

Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex. ~ Karl Marx

In any relationship, the woman has control, the clever ones don't let the men know. ~ Groucho Marx

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce. ~ Karl Marx

I hear you're looking for a sexy blonde to play with the Marx Brothers. Would you like to see me. I'm blonde and I'm sexy. ~ Marilyn Monroe

Being doped is a pleasure you pay for. There was always opium there for the people
in the end it tainted their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for
although of course it may have been competing with them for the first place among the rulers, as in the Middle Ages. Whenever it was a question of keeping the serfs, and then the paid slaves down, the dope-dealers came unfailingly to the help of the oppressors. ~ Ernst Bloch

As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah , so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital . ~ Karl Marx

Go, and never darken my towels again. ~ Groucho Marx

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception. ~ Groucho Marx

Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,
and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance
of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes
suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape
of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no
longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes
valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with
the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,
declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a
commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul
after money, the only wealth. ~ Karl Marx

Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. ~ Karl Marx

In a Chicago cafe the other night, an elderly man passed a table.
"There goes George," observed an onlooker. "When he was young, he was a handsome guy and had many companies. Left a wife and two kids to starve, and ran off with another woman. And now look at him. Old, broke and very sad."
"That's the way-it-goes," nodded Elly Kleinman. "Time wounds all heels. ~ Groucho Marx

I'm not much of a correspondent. My letters are not only uninteresting but sparse. I'm glad I don?t have to write for a living. It?s arduous work and the money is very uncertain. On those rare occasions when I wander into a bookstore it amazes me to see the avalanche of literature and semi-literature that is turned out weekly in this country. The people who write these things are either desperate for money or love starved. Why should anyone on a nice balmy day lock oneself in an office and hit a typewriter for hours on end. I think one of the greatest pleasures in the world is not writing ... ~ Groucho Marx

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still 'un-analysed' and crying aloud for treatment.
The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which 'verified' the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation--which revealed the class bias of the paper--and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantl ~ Karl Popper

Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life ~ Groucho Marx

As the man left and became gone the fault wailed after him, heartbroken. Yelling back at him all the ways he and it belonged to one another. ~ Rosca Marx

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity. ~ Karl Marx

Love had forged ahead so swiftly that in no time it had displaced agriculture as the leading industry of the period. To anyone who has tried both, this wont come as much of a surprise. ~ Groucho Marx

Here's to our wives and girlfriends ... may they never meet! ~ Groucho Marx

Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men
the other 999 follow women. ~ Groucho Marx

A clown is like aspirin, only he works twice as fast. ~ Groucho Marx

One cannot do justice to Marx without recognizing his sincerity. His open-mindedness, his sense of facts, his distrust of verbiage, and especially of moralizing verbiage, made him one of the world's most influential fighters against hypocrisy and pharisaism. He had a burning desire to help the oppressed, and was fully conscious of the need for proving himself in deeds, and not only in words. His main talents being theoretical, he devoted immense labour to forging what he believed to be scientific weapons for the fight to improve the lot of the vast majority of men. His sincerity in his search for truth and his intellectual honesty distinguish him, I believe, from many of his followers (although unfortunately he did not altogether escape the corrupting influence of an upbringing in the atmosphere of Hegelian dialectics, described by Schopenhauer as 'destructive of all intelligence'). Marx's interest in social science and social philosophy was fundamentally a practical interest. He saw in knowledge a means of promoting the progress of man. ~ Karl Popper

Religion is the opium of the masses. ~ Karl Marx

My paper has to be very long and complex," I said. "I shall cite all the great thinkers - Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud." "What about Adolf Hitler?" "Oh, him. He's not a thinker. He's just a ranter and raver." "There may come a time," said Pepi, "when people cannot tell the difference." "Impossible," I solemnly predicted. "I have read Hitler's book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany's troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear." "Just like all your old boyfriends," Pepi said with his sly smile. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude. ~ Karl Marx

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak. ~ Karl Marx

It doesn't matter where anybody lives, we're all here. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

What is crucial in the true state is not the fact that every citizen has the chance to devote himself to the universal interest in the shape of a particular class, but the capacity of the universal class to be really universal, i.e. to be the class of every citizen. ~ Karl Marx

The realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. ~ Karl Marx

Marx and other social critics quipped, Western governments were becoming a capitalist trade union. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Clowns work as well as aspirin, but twice as fast. ~ Groucho Marx

There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them. ~ Karl Marx

The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage , in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy . ~ Karl Marx

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off. ~ Karl Marx

I won't belong to any organization that would have me as a member. ~ Groucho Marx

Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time. ~ Karl Marx

Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave. ~ Ellen Willis

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. ~ Karl Marx

Groucho Marx This is not a book that should be set aside lightly - it should be flung with great force. ~ Groucho Marx

I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book. ~ Groucho Marx

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of politicaldiscourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud ... These were therequirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable. ~ Michel Foucault

There exists [a] word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory. ~ Louis Althusser

The next Freud will be a data scientist. The next Marx will be a data scientist. The next Salk might very well be a data scientist. ~ Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Just as foreplay is the key to good sex, preparation is essential to achieving victory in battle. Right, lieutenant? ~ Natalia Marx

Aidan: "From the moment I laid eyes on her she was trouble to my concentration, my libido, and my mental health. After six weeks of pursuit, I'd trapped her between my upraised arms against a book case, somewhere betwixt Shakespeare and Voltaire. "I want the witchcraft in your lips," I'd whispered. Instead of arguing, she grabbed me by the ears. She'd been soft lips, liberal tongue and nipping teeth. I'd contributed a willing body and a vulgar groan. She'd drawn away, licked her lips and ducked underneath my arms. When she was about three yards from me, she's tilted her head up like a siren on the bow of a ship and pursed a devil-may-care smile at me before she bowed. She'd challenged me to pursue her, and I'd intended to, but when I pushed off, the bookcase fell backwards. I tumbled into a heap of literary tombs. I could still hear her laughing when the library's elevator door chimed closed. ~ Elizabeth Marx

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary ~ Karl Marx

Ideas do not exist separately from language. ~ Karl Marx

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? ~ Groucho Marx

The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker. ~ Karl Marx

Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people. ~ Richard Heinberg

Marx himself wrote that capitalism produces above all its own gravediggers. Do you think that perhaps he wasn't talking about capitalism? ~ Paullina Simons

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

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted. ~ Groucho Marx

The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things ... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. ~ Karl Marx

He's so full of alcohol, if you put a lighted wick in his mouth he'd burn for three days. ~ Groucho Marx

The mystery of this courage of Bauer's is Hegel's Phenomenology. As Hegel here puts self-consciousness in the place of man, the most varied human reality appears only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness. But a mere determination of self-consciousness is a "pure category," a mere "thought" which I can consequently also abolish in "pure" thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel's Phenomenology the material, perceptible, objective bases of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are left as they are. Thus the whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously real world, by merely transforming it into a "thing of thought" a mere determination of self-consciousness and can therefore dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the "ether of pure thought." Phenomenology is therefore quite logical when in the end it replaces human reality by "Absolute Knowledge" - Knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, because self-consciousness is considered as the only mode of existence of man; absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows itself alone and is no more disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, man living in a real objective world and determined by that world. He ~ Karl Marx

I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I understand that, but this disc shows the type of music that I've always liked and wanted to make. ~ Richard Marx

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society - the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. ~ Karl Marx

frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries. ~ Howard Zinn

Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with there capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. ~ Karl Marx

Barbara Stanwyck and I began our relationship on Titanic, although we had actually met years before. For a time, my father had an eight-acre ranch in Chatsworth, across from the racetrack. Martha Scott also lived there, and I used to take care of her horse. We'd go riding, and I would see Barbara and her husband, Robert Taylor, riding. I would go trotting along with them, never thinking I'd be involved with her someday. Later, Barbara had a beautiful ranch at the corner of Devonshire and Reseda, with her agent, Zeppo Marx. It's now a shopping center, but when Barbara owned the ranch, it had paddocks that were impeccably maintained and run, like everything Barbara touched. ~ Robert Wagner

Ignorance never yet helped anybody. ~ Karl Marx

Apocalypse can mean the unveiling of the deeper self of humanity. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

What is especially ironic about these professors' rhetoric of "otherness" and "queerness" is that they are, in fact, by any real-world measure, extremely conservative, lockstep, institutional, careerist creatures. Their sense of identification with their universities, their departments, and their fields of "study", not to mention the obvious way they size one another up by their titles, academic affiliation, and publications, is stifling. So are their endless pious references to Marx, Foucault, and Derrida, which bring to mind the obligatory nods to the Great Leader at some Communist Party congress. ~ Bruce Bawer

Hey you! I told you to slow that nag down! Because of you, I almost heard the opera! ~ Groucho Marx