Top 75 Friedrich Engels Quotes
#1. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
Friedrich Engels
#2. Actually, each mental image of the world system is and remains limited, objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by its author's physical and mental constitution.
Friedrich Engels
#3. With the pairing family, therefore, the abduction and barter of women began - widespread symptoms, and nothing but that, of a new and much more profound change.
Friedrich Engels
#4. We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends
the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.
Friedrich Engels
#5. How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.
Friedrich Engels
#6. Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world ... the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.
Friedrich Engels
#7. We must apologise to the readers for returning with such insistence to the Robinson Crusoe and Friday story, which properly belongs to the nursery and not to the field of science - but how can we help it?
Friedrich Engels
#8. In a political struggle of class against class, organization of trade unions is the most important weapon.
Friedrich Engels
#9. The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.
Friedrich Engels
#11. All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.
Friedrich Engels
#12. The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.
Friedrich Engels
#14. Capitalist production ... was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this.
Friedrich Engels
#15. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Friedrich Engels
#16. Not democracy caused the downfall of Athens, as the European glorifiers of princes and lickspittle schoolmasters would have us believe, but slavery ostracizing the labor of the free citizen. The
Friedrich Engels
#17. The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.
Friedrich Engels
#18. Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them..'If you don't like to be frizzled in my frying- pan, you can take a walk into the fire.
Friedrich Engels
#19. Don't forget any affront done to you and to all our people, the time of revenge will come and must be put to good use.
Friedrich Engels
#20. The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Friedrich Engels
#21. And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.
Friedrich Engels
#22. In 10 years, this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation - the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half annexed already socially - hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern.
Friedrich Engels
#23. Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.
Friedrich Engels
#24. Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.
Friedrich Engels
#25. Firstly, the farmers, the most stupid set of people in existence, who, clinging to feudal prejudices, burst forth in masses, ready to die rather than cease to obey those whom they, their fathers and grandfathers, had called their masters; and submitted to be trampled on and horse-whipped by.
Friedrich Engels
#26. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
Friedrich Engels
#27. Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.
Friedrich Engels
#28. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Friedrich Engels
#31. The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.
Friedrich Engels
#32. Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism.
Friedrich Engels
#33. From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
Friedrich Engels
#35. It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes into the foreground.
Friedrich Engels
#37. The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1795 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged.
Friedrich Engels
#39. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living.
Friedrich Engels
#40. I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.
Friedrich Engels
#41. What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
Friedrich Engels
#42. What is good for the ruling class, is alleged to be good for the whole of society with which the ruling class identifies itself.
Friedrich Engels
#44. The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
Friedrich Engels
#46. The middle classes have a truly extraordinary conception of society. They really believe that human beings ... have real existence only if they make money or help to make it.
Friedrich Engels
#47. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.
Quoted in The Situationists and the City, pg. 194
Friedrich Engels
#48. No party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances without lying
Friedrich Engels
#49. Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.
Friedrich Engels
#50. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.
Friedrich Engels
#51. Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.
Friedrich Engels
#52. Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.
Friedrich Engels
#53. But the degradation of the women was avenged in the men and degraded them also, until they sank into the abomination of boy-love.
Friedrich Engels
#54. Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late 'seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
Friedrich Engels
#55. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Friedrich Engels
#56. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.
Friedrich Engels
#57. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.
Friedrich Engels
#58. Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth, and wealth again; wealth not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim.
Friedrich Engels
#59. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process.
Friedrich Engels
#60. All that is real in human history becomes irrational in the process of time.
Friedrich Engels
#61. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.
Friedrich Engels
#62. One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?
Friedrich Engels
#63. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
Friedrich Engels
#64. In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.
Friedrich Engels
#65. Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Friedrich Engels
#66. It would appear that the natural frontier of Russia runs from Dantzic or perhaps Stettin to Trieste.
Friedrich Engels
#67. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets.
Friedrich Engels
#68. This police force consisted--of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service.
Friedrich Engels
#69. It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.
Friedrich Engels
#70. The British Labour movement is today, and for many years has been, working in a narrow circle of strikes that are looked upon, not as an expedient, and not as a means of propaganda, but as an ultimate aim.
Friedrich Engels
#71. Prostitution demoralizes men far more than women. Prostitution does not degrade the whole female sex, but only the luckless women that become its victims, and even those not to the extent generally assumed. But it degrades the character of the entire male world.
Friedrich Engels
#72. The first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first class oppression with that of the female by the male sex.
Friedrich Engels
#73. Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Friedrich Engels
#74. The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.
Friedrich Engels
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