I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.
Interpretation
Collective cooperation enhances individual potential and benefits society as a whole.
In this quote, Karl Marx emphasizes the importance of collaboration among workers, suggesting that when individuals unite and work together systematically, they transcend their personal limitations. This collective effort not only liberates them from the constraints of individualism but also fosters the development of shared human capabilities, ultimately contributing to the betterment of society.
In practice
During a team-building workshop, this quote could inspire participants to value collaboration.
I am nothing but I must be everything.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
Meditation... dissolves the mind. It erases itself. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass.
Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.
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