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Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

— Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

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More quotes by Karl Marx

Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.

The German Ideology (1845)

The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value.

Grundrisse (1857)

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.

The Holy Family (1845)

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

The German Ideology (1845)

Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Karl Marx (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.