Friedrich Engels Quotes

All history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development.

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.

Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

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.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.

Ideas often kindle each other, like electrical sparks.

I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

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.

What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

In a political struggle of class against class, organization of trade unions is the most important weapon.

All that is real in human history becomes irrational in the process of time.

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

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.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes into the foreground.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.

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.

The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late 'seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

It would appear that the natural frontier of Russia runs from Dantzic or perhaps Stettin to Trieste.

The state is not abolished, it withers away.

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living.

Life is the mode of action of proteins.

And what is impossible to science?

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

No party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances without lying

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.