Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right Quotes

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“I am nothing but I must be everything.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“[Martin] Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“When the proletariat declares the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order, it merely declares the secret of its own existence, since it is in fact the dissolution of this order. When it demands the negation of private property, it is only laying down as a principle for society what society has laid down as a principle for the proletariat, what has already been incorporated in itself without its consent as the negative result of society.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Ser radical é tomar as coisas pela raiz. Mas, para o homem, a raiz é o próprio homem.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“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, A Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State

“In a rational state it would be more appropriate to ensure that a cobbler passed an examination than an executive civil servant; because shoe-making is a craft in the absence of which it is still possible to be a good citizen and a man in society. But the necessary 'knowledge of the state' is a precondition in the absence of which one lives outside the state, cut off from the air one breathes and from oneself. Thus the 'examination' is nothing but a Masonic initiation, the legal recognition of the knowledge of citizenship, the acknowledgement of a privilege.

This 'link' between the 'individual' and his 'office', this objective bond between the knowledge of civil society and the knowledge of the state, namely the examination, is nothing but the bureaucratic baptism of knowledge, the official recognition of the transubstantiation of profane knowledge into sacred knowledge (it is plain that in every examination the examiner is omniscient).

It is not recorded that Greek and Roman statesmen ever took examinations. But then what is a Roman statesman compared to a Prussian civil servant!”
― Karl Marx, A Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: 'Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soul-less circumstances. It is the opium of the people.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“It is the imaginary realization of human essence, because the human essence possesses no true reality.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Man has found in the imaginary reality of heaven where he looked for a superman only in the reflection of his own self.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, already died once of their wounds in Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death - this time a comic one - in Lucian's dialogues.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Человечество, смеясь, расстается со своим прошлым”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“In the struggle against that state of affairs, criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself, it is no object worthy of thought, it is an existence which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an end-in-itself, but only of a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Hegel is not to be blamed for depicting the nature of the modern state as it is, but rather for presenting what is as the essence of the state. The claim that the rational is actual is contradicted precisely by an irrational actuality, which everywhere is the contrary of what it asserts and asserts the contrary of what it is.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Religion is the self-consciousness and self-regard of man who has either not yet found or has already lost himself”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Eleştiri, zinciri süsleyen hayali çiçekleri, insan bu gerçek dışı süslerden soyulmuş prangaları taşısın diye değil, zincirleri fırlatıp atsın ve canlı çiçeğe uzansın diye kopartmıştır.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Die Gesamtheit dieser Produktionsverhältnisse bildet die ökonomische Struktur der Gesellschaft, die reale Basis, worauf sich ein juristischer und politischer Überbau erhebt und welcher bestimmte gesellschaftliche Bewußtseinsformen entsprechen. Die Produktionsweise des materiellen Lebens bedingt den sozialen, politischen und geistigen Lebensprozeß überhaupt. Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt. Auf einer gewissen Stufe ihrer Entwicklung geraten die materiellen Produktivkräfte der Gesellschaft in Widerspruch mit den vorhandenen Produktionsverhältnissen oder, was nur ein juristischer Ausdruck dafür ist, mit den Eigentumsverhältnissen, innerhalb deren sie sich bisher bewegt hatten.”
― Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy