Friedrich Engels Quotes

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ideas often kindle each other, like electrical sparks.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The state is not abolished, it withers away.

The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of societythe taking possession of the means of production in the name of societythis 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.

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