If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

It is perfectly true that, considered as a whole, the working class spends, and must spend, its income upon necessaries. A general rise in the rate of wages would, therefore, produce a rise in the demand for, and consequently in the market prices of, necessaries. The capitalists who produce these necessaries would be compensated for the risen wages by the rising market prices of their commodities.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value.

All the illusions in regard to the monetary system are due to the fact that money is not regarded as something representing a social relation of production, but as a product of nature endowed with certain properties. The modern economists who sneer at the illusions of the monetary system, betray the same illusion as soon as they have to deal with higher economic forms, as, e.g., capital. It breaks forth in their confession of naive surprise, when what they have just thought to have defined with great difficulty as a thing suddenly appears as a social relation and then reappears to tease them again as a thing, before they have barely managed to define it as a social relation.

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital ... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.

Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.

Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.

KARL MARX, "Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.

Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.

If the productivity of labor increases, the same use-value will be produced in less time. If the productivity of labor declines, more time will be required for the production of the same use-value. Thus, the labor time contained in a commodity or its exchange-value is a variable quantity, increasing or diminishing in an inverse ratio to the rise and fall of the productivity of labor.

The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker.

KARL MARX, "Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

You would be altogether mistaken in fancying that the value of labor or any other commodity whatever is ultimately fixed by supply and demand. Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for that value itself. Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease to work in the one or the other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate.

The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.

KARL MARX, "Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

KARL MARX, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

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.

KARL MARX, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto

Law, morality, religion, are ... so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto

Everyone has a goal which appears to be great, at least to himself, and is great when deepest conviction, the innermost voice of the heart, pronounces it great.... This voice, however, is easily drowned out, and what we thought to be inspiration may have been created by the fleeting moment and again perhaps destroyed by it.... We must seriously ask ourselves, therefore, whether we are really inspired about a vocation, whether an inner voice approves of it, or whether the inspiration was a deception, whether that which we took as the Deity's calling to us was self-deceit. But how else could we recognize this except by searching for the source of our inspiration?

KARL MARX, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

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