Top 100 Engels's Quotes
#1. Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something
Terry Eagleton
#2. All that is real in human history becomes irrational in the process of time.
Friedrich Engels
#3. As Engels memorably put it: "The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.
Anonymous
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.
Friedrich Engels
#8. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Friedrich Engels
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I have found that it's not so much how you start, but how you finish that counts." -Declan
Brittany L. Engels
#12. 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
#13. Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.
Friedrich Engels
#14. 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
#15. Face me and learn that I'm not alone, attack and you'll find that my Leader stands beside me. I will bleed and I may die, but this warrior will not be shaken!" -Regan
Brittany L. Engels
#16. 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
#17. No party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances without lying
Friedrich Engels
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren't storming the gates.
Steven Johnson
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. Go free those held captive, and free the souls who are bound in the darkness." -Driscoll
Brittany L. Engels
#26. What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
Friedrich Engels
#27. The best things in this world are meant to be fought for." -Kearney
Brittany L. Engels
#28. Marx and Engels are arguably history's most famous couple. Such was the closeness of their collaboration that it is not always easy to recall which works bore both names, which just that of Marx, and which just Engels.
Martin Jacques
#29. In their day, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin represented the aspirations and demands of the exploited working masses, and the cause of socialism was inseparably linked with their names.
Kim Jong Il
#30. We are indebted to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin for giving us a weapon. The weapon is not a machine-gun, but Marxism-Leninism.
Mao Zedong
#31. This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.
Ludwig Von Mises
#32. 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
#33. Marx and Engels openly declared that the progressive income tax and the death tax are 'economically untenable' and that they advocated them only because 'they necessitate further inroads' upon the capitalist system and are 'unavoidable' as a means of bringing about socialism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#34. 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
#35. Maybe it's not about being worthy, or what you have to offer. If it was, wouldn't everyone be turned away?" -Niall
Brittany L. Engels
#36. 1849 - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels present, The Communist Manifesto, declaring "the abolition of private property.
Brian Sussman
#37. I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.
George Jackson
#38. 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
#39. It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.
Friedrich Engels
#40. I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.
Friedrich Engels
#41. 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
#42. Time to wake to a wholesome diet--Marx and Engels, Andy Warhol and Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouak and the Grateful Dead, Sartre and Gide--it was a regimen of semen in the sixties and we never even knew we were choking. [109]
Claire Robson
#43. 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
#44. What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say "I am not a Marxist"?
Jacques Derrida
#45. It would appear that the natural frontier of Russia runs from Dantzic or perhaps Stettin to Trieste.
Friedrich Engels
#46. Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Friedrich Engels
#47. After Marx died, Engels denied that Marx had said that 'the economic element is the only determining one'. He and Marx, he conceded, were partly to blame for this misinterpretation, for they had emphasized the economic side in opposition to those who rejected it altogether.
Anonymous
#48. In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.
Friedrich Engels
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Rangan came to the surface in the mid-afternoon of Inauguration Day, in the trunk of a car driven by a terrified aide of Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security.
Ramez Naam
#55. I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.
Margaret Thatcher
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Friedrich Engels
#59. If darkness was meant to rule it wouldn't be chased away by the Light." -Sheelagh
Brittany L. Engels
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.
Friedrich Engels
#65. this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present may be 'honestly' meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and 'honest' opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all
Frederick Engels
#66. In a political struggle of class against class, organization of trade unions is the most important weapon.
Friedrich Engels
#67. Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out.
Assata Shakur
#68. 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
#69. Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.
Rachel Holmes
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. This trail is never-changing, it won't lead you astray. It won't always be easy to follow and at times it will look too narrow for your paws. Follow it anyway, and you'll overcome every challenge you face." -Faolan
Brittany L. Engels
#75. 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
#76. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
Friedrich Engels
#79. 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
#81. It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes into the foreground.
Friedrich Engels
#83. It was the Russians that introduced the Chinese to Marxism. Before the October Revolution, the Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin but did not even know of Marx or Engels. The salvos of the October Revolution awoke us to Marxism-Leninism.
Mao Zedong
#84. From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
Friedrich Engels
#85. 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
#86. 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
#88. I know him by another name. His real one is Slem, not uncommon for men of his generation. It stands for Stalin Lenin Engels Marx. He's always making up new names for himself
wouldn't you?
Victor Robert Lee
#89. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living.
Friedrich Engels
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.
Friedrich Engels
#96. 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
#97. I might not have faith in many things, but I do have faith in this; that the one who sent me out will allow me to finish the mission." -Regan
Brittany L. Engels
#98. 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
#99. The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Friedrich Engels
#100. 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
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