From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
—Friedrich Engels
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Necessity
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Law, Lawyers
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
Topics: Government
Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from the 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
Topics: Wealth
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: General, Action, Courage, Entrepreneurs
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
Topics: Class
The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. 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. The State is not abolished. It dies out.
—Friedrich Engels
All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: History, Class
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: General, Courage, Entrepreneurs, Action
Thus the freer the judgement of a man is in regard to a definite issue, with so much greater necessity will the substance of this judgement be determined.
—Friedrich Engels
Topics: Rationality
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Karl Marx German Philosopher, Economist
- Mikhail Bakunin Russian Anarchist
- Auguste Comte French Philosopher
- Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach German Philosopher
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel German Man of Letters
- Christopher Hitchens Anglo-American Social Critic
- John Rawls American Philosopher
- Jose Ortega y. Gasset Spanish Philosopher
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel German Philosopher
- Marshall Mcluhan Canadian Thinker
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