Marx Quotes

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. (Ronald Reagan)
The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct. View quote
Dean Koontz
Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike. View quote
Benjamin Tucker
Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great. View quote
Clement Attlee
There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian. View quote
Murray Rothbard
Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished. View quote
Dario Fo
To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx. View quote
Groucho Marx
In their day, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin represented the aspirations and demands of the exploited working masses, and the cause of socialism was inseparably linked with their names. View quote
Kim Jong-il
Karl Marx made a great contribution to the liberation cause of mankind, and because of his immortal exploits his name is still enshrined in the hearts of the working class and peoples of all countries. View quote
Kim Jong-il
The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i. e., he must be a dialectical materialist. (Vladimir Lenin)
Marx... Lenin... Mao Tse-Tung... These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions. View quote
Dorothy Day
The principle of collective leadership is elementary for a proletarian party and for a party of the Lenin type. Nevertheless, we must emphasize this old truth, because for about 20 years we have had practically no collective leadership; there flourished the cult of the individual which was condemned first by Marx and then by Lenin. And this, of course, could not but reflect negatively on the position of the party and its work. View quote
Anastas Mikoyan
For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Precisely because Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole future of mankind, he wanted to create for that cause not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Marx profoundly affected those who did not accept his system. His influence extended to those who least supposed they were subject to it. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
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. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
The fundamental differences between Marxian and traditional orthodox economics are, first, that the orthodox economists accept the capitalist system as part of the eternal order of Nature, while Marx regards it as a passing phase in the transition from the feudal economy of the past to the socialist economy of the future. View quote
Joan Robinson
Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx. View quote
Joan Robinson
It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his. View quote
Tony Benn
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)
The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to this concept, means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war against reaction from without that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in complete liquidation. View quote
Leon Trotsky
Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise. View quote
David Harvey
Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late 'seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist. View quote
Friedrich Engels
They say that the Soviet delegates smile. That smile is genuine. It is not artificial. We wish to live in peace, tranquility. But if anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin he deceives himself poorly. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle. View quote
Nikita Khrushchev