Friedrich Engels Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

The bourgeoisie... lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority. Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests!

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

Friedrich Engels
People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.

Friedrich Engels
By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium — by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilization as against barbarism, of progress as against stability. Even if the agreements were in Denmark's favor — which is very doubtful-this right carries more weight than all the agreements, for it is the right of historical evolution.

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

Friedrich Engels
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
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
The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.

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

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

Friedrich Engels
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