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Who really said it

Religion is the opiate of the masses

Karl Marx — but the English wording is nobody’s translation Karl Marx 1818–1883 · German philosopher, economist and journalist
Attributed Free to reuse

The thought is Marx’s and it is precisely locatable: the introduction to Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie, written in 1843 and published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The German is ‘Sie ist das Opium des Volks’ — the opium of the people. Every major published English translation renders it ‘people’; ‘opiate of the masses’ matches none of them. And it is half of a longer sentence whose other half almost never travels with it.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Religion is the opiate of the masses” Marx actually wrote: "Sie ist das Opium des Volks" — the opium of the people. Zur Kritik der Hegel'schen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844, p. 72.

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Provenance

The source

Work
Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung
Written / published
1843; printed February 1844
Where
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, pp. 71–85
German verbatim
Sie ist das Opium des Volks

Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, 1844

Marx’s German as printed in 1844. In English: ‘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 clause everyone quotes is the last six words of a three-sentence run.

The 1844 German printing, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher

How we traced it

  • The German above is transcribed from the 1844 printing in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, page 72 — note the period spellings, Gemüth for Gemüt and the genitive Volks where modern editions print Volkes. The journal ran to about a thousand copies and made almost no impression at the time the German text ↗.
  • The standard English is the Jolin and O’Malley translation, edited by Joseph O’Malley for Cambridge University Press in 1970: ‘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 italics on opium are Marx’s own the English text ↗.
  • So where does ‘masses’ come from? We could not identify a published translation that uses it. The scholarly editions — Jolin and O’Malley, the Marx-Engels Collected Works, Bottomore — all say ‘people.’ The likeliest answer is that no translator produced it: it is a spoken paraphrase that hardened, helped along by ‘opiate’ sounding more clinical than ‘opium’ and ‘masses’ sounding more Marxist than ‘people.’ We flag that as unresolved rather than guess a culprit.
  • The phrase only became widely known in the 1930s, as Marxism spread in the English-speaking world — nearly a century after it was printed background ↗.
Public domain

Marx died in 1883 and the German original was published in 1844, so the German is public domain everywhere — quote it freely. The catch is the English. A translation is a copyrightable work in its own right, and the standard version, by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley for Cambridge University Press in 1970, is in copyright. If you want a free English text, use one published before 1930 or make your own from the German. This is not legal advice.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

Fact-check

What goes wrong here

The author is right. Two other things are not: the English words, and the amount of the sentence that gets quoted. Both changes push in the same direction.

Not in any standard translation wording

The German is Volk — people, a people, the populace. The scholarly English editions all print ‘people.’ We could not identify a published translation using ‘masses,’ and we are not going to invent one; on the evidence it looks like a spoken paraphrase that stuck.

Marx wrote ‘Opium’ wording

A small swap with a real effect. In 1843 opium was the ordinary painkiller of the age, legal, medicinal and everywhere — laudanum in the cupboard. ‘Opiate’ reads to a modern ear as a narcotic administered to somebody. The metaphor Marx reached for was closer to morphine for a broken leg.

The sentence before it framing

‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.’ Whatever one makes of the argument, this is not a sneer at believers; it is a claim about the conditions that produce belief. Quoted alone, the last clause reads as an accusation. Quoted whole, it reads as a diagnosis.

Quoted it, did not coin it sometimes credited

Lenin used the line in Novaya Zhizn on 3 December 1905 — ‘Religion is opium of the people’ — and again in 1909, and his usage did more than Marx’s to spread it. But he was quoting a text printed 61 years earlier, when he was not yet born Lenin’s text ↗.

Older than Marx context

Novalis in 1798 wrote that so-called religion ‘works simply as an opiate’; Heine in 1840 welcomed a religion pouring ‘soporific drops of spiritual opium’ into human suffering; Bruno Bauer, a direct influence, wrote of religion’s ‘opium-like stupefaction.’ Marx was joining a conversation, not starting one.

Marx wrote ‘Sie ist das Opium des Volks’ — the opium of the people — in the 1843 introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, printed in 1844; Lenin quoted it, and ‘opiate of the masses’ matches no published translation the passage ↗.

Context

Why the wording matters

The slogan and the sentence do different jobs. ‘Opiate of the masses’ is a verdict, delivered from above, about people being drugged. ‘The sigh of the oppressed creature… it is the opium of the people’ is an argument about why the sigh exists at all — and the paragraph immediately after it goes on to call religion an illusory happiness whose abolition Marx demanded.

You do not have to agree with him to want the actual words. Both readers who use the line as a takedown and readers who resent it as one are usually working from six words of a passage that runs to several paragraphs.

In 1843 opium was the painkiller in everyone's cupboard, not a narcotic administered to somebody.

The passage, in order

‘Man makes religion, religion does not make man.’

‘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.’

‘The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.’

All quotations from the Jolin and O’Malley translation (Cambridge, 1970); italics are Marx’s.

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie (1844) — German originalde.wikisource.org

The text as printed in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, with page images. The sentence is on p. 72.
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introductionmarxists.org

The Jolin and O’Malley English translation, with Marx’s italics preserved.
Opium of the peopleen.wikipedia.org

The full passage, the publication history, and the 19th-century writers — Novalis, Heine, Bauer — who used the opium metaphor before Marx.
Lenin, ‘Socialism and Religion’, Novaya Zhizn, 3 December 1905marxists.org

Where Lenin quotes the line — ‘Religion is opium of the people’ — and adds his own image of ‘spiritual booze’.

The true author

About Karl Marx

Karl Marx

1818–1883 · German philosopher, economist and journalist

Karl Marx was 25 and working as a journalist in Paris when he wrote this introduction, several years before The Communist Manifesto and two decades before Das Kapital. The book it introduces was never published in his lifetime; the introduction appeared on its own in a journal that folded after a single double issue. He was writing in a German intellectual scene where the opium comparison was already common currency — Novalis had used it in 1798, Heine in 1840, Bruno Bauer twice in the early 1840s. What Marx added was the sentence around it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Marx, Karl. “Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung.” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, February 1844, pp. 71–85 (quotation p. 72). English: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, ed. J. O’Malley (Cambridge University Press, 1970).

MLA (9th ed.)

Marx, Karl. “Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung.” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844, p. 72.

APA (7th ed.)

Marx, K. (1844). Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 71–85.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses

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