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Taxes are the existence of the state expressed in economic terms. 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 Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality (1847)

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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.