I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Economic laws are often based on arbitrary events rather than fixed principles.
In this quote, Karl Marx highlights that what is often considered the 'laws' of economics are merely conclusions drawn from random occurrences rather than universally applicable truths. He argues that learned individuals selectively elevate certain moments of chance into established rules, reflecting a deeper critique of how economic theory can be misrepresented or oversimplified.
Themes
EconomicsLawsChanceArbitraryPrinciples
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the unpredictability of markets, one might quote Marx to emphasize that economic outcomes are often coincidental.
More from Karl Marx
All quotes βReligion is the opiate of the people.
Karl MarxRead
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.
Karl MarxRead
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.
Karl MarxRead
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Karl MarxRead
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Karl MarxRead
Similar quotes
We want a free market, but we know that the paradox of a 'free' market is that sometimes you have to intervene. You have to make sure it's not the law of the jungle but the laws of democracy that works.
Margrethe VestagerRead
There can be economy only where there is efficiency.
Benjamin DisraeliRead
If they are too big to fail, make them smaller.
George P. ShultzRead
Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth?
Simon KuznetsRead
If bankers become overly conservative in response to past lending mistakes - or if examiners force such behavior - it will hurt bankers' own long-term interests and the economy in general.
Ben BernankeRead
When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty.
Malcolm GladwellRead