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Friedrich Engels

94 quotes

• “For I am of the opinion... that the reconquest of the German speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1841 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Written under the pseudonym of Friedrich Oswald, “Telegraph für Deutschland”, Telegraph für Deutschland, Nos. 2-5, (January 1841)

• “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 (1820–1895) first seen 1847 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith (1847)

• “For the first time in the revolutionary movement of 1848, for the first time since 1793, a nation surrounded by superior forces dares to counter the cowardly counter-revolutionary fury by revolutionary passion, the terreur blanche by the terreur rouge. For the first time after a long period we meet with a truly revolutionary figure, a man who in the name of his people dares to accept the challenge of a desperate struggle, who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person — Lajos Kossuth.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Magyar Struggle in (13 January 1849).

• “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 and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Magyar Struggle in (13 January 1849)

• “The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the Poles are une nation foutue [a finished nation] who can only continue to serve a purpose until such time as Russia herself becomes caught up into the agrarian revolution. From that moment Poland will have absolutely no raison d'étre any more. The Poles' sole contribution to history has been to indulge in foolish pranks at once valiant and provocative. Nor can a single moment be cited when Poland, even if only by comparison with Russia, has successfully represented progress or done anything of historical significance.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1851 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Karl Marx (23 May 1851)

• “Lassalle. It would be a pity about the fellow because of his great ability, but these goings-on are really too bad. He was always a man one had to keep a devilish sharp eye on and as a real Jew from the Slav border was always to exploit anyone for his own private ends on party pretexts. And then his urge to push his way into polite society, de parvenir, if only for appearance's sake, to disguise the greasy Breslau Jew with all kinds of pomade and paint was always repulsive.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1856 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Karl Marx (7 March 1856), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 40. Letters 1856–59 (2010), p. 27

• “What do you say to the elections in the factory districts? Once again the proletariat has discredited itself terribly... [I]t cannot be denied that the increase of working-class voters has brought the Tories more than their mere additional percentage and has improved their relative position.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1846 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Karl Marx (18 November 1868), quoted in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895 (1942), pp. 253-254

• “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 (1820–1895) first seen 1869 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Karl Marx (9 December 1869)

• “La Terreur, das sind großenteils nutzlose Grausamkeiten, begangen von Leuten, die selbst Angst haben, zu ihrer Selbstberuhigung.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Marx (4 September 1870)

• “Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: (1876)

• “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 (1820–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Anti-Dühring, Introduction, General (1877)

• “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 (1820–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Anti-Dühring, pt. 1, ch. 11 (1877)

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

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Anti-Dühring, pt. 1, ch. 11 (1877)

• “Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Anti-Dühring, pt. 2, ch. 4 (1877)

• “The state is not "abolished," it withers away.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Anti-Dühring, pt. 3, ch. 2 (1877)

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

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1886 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)

• “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 (1820–1895) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: , footnote (1888 edition)

• “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 (1820–1895) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to (August 5, 1890)

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

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to (September 21, 1890)

• “People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in and swear by the . 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 (1820–1895) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Introduction to 1891 edition of Karl Marx's, The Civil War in France

• “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 (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (1901)

• “History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time [1848] was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Introduction (1895) to Marx's The Class Struggles in France (1848-50)

• “The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries," the "rebels"—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité notes tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Introduction (1895) to Marx's The Class Struggles in France (1848-50), p. 27

• “Among the higher animals the herd and the family are not complementary to one another, but antagonistic.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Paraphrasing a quote by Alfred Espinas in his work (1877). (1884)

• “Die Nationalökonomie entstand als eine natürliche Folge der Ausdehnung des Handels, und mit ihr trat an die Stelle des einfachen, unwissenschaftlichen Schachers ein ausgebildetes System des erlaubten Betrugs, eine komplette Bereicherungswissenschaft.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Diese aus dem gegenseitigen Neid und der Habgier der Kaufleute entstandene Nationalökonomie oder Bereicherungswissenschaft trägt das Gepräge der ekelhaftesten Selbstsucht auf der Stirne.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Das Merkantilsystem hatte noch eine gewisse unbefangene, katholische Geradheit und verdeckte das unsittliche Wesen des Handels nicht im mindesten. ... Als aber der ökonomische Luther, Adam Smith, die bisherige Ökonomie kritisierte, hatten sich die Sachen sehr geändert. ... An die Stelle der katholischen Geradheit trat protestantische Gleisnerei.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Natürlich ist es im Interesse des Handelnden, mit dem einen, von welchem er wohlfeil kauft, wie mit dem andern, an welchen er teuer verkauft, sich in gutem Vernehmen zu halten. Es ist also sehr unklug von einer Nation gehandelt, wenn sie bei ihren Versorgern und Kunden eine feindselige Stimmung nährt. Je freundschaftlicher, desto vorteilhafter. Dies ist die Humanität des Handels, und diese gleisnerische Art, die Sittlichkeit zu unsittlichen Zwecken zu mißbrauchen, ist der Stolz des Systems der Handelsfreiheit.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ihr habt die kleinen Monopole vernichtet, um das EINE große Grundmonopol, das Eigentum, desto freier und schrankenloser wirken zu lassen; ihr habt die Enden der Erde zivilisiert, um neues Terrain für die Entfaltung eurer niedrigen Habsucht zu gewinnen, ihr habt die Völker verbrüdert, aber zu einer Brüderschaft von Dieben.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ihr habt ... die Kriege vermindert, um im Frieden desto mehr zu verdienen, um die Feindschaft der einzelnen, den ehrlosen Krieg der Konkurrenz, auf die höchste Spitze zu treiben! - Wo habt ihr etwas aus reiner Humanität, aus dem Bewußtsein der Nichtigkeit des Gegensatzes zwischen dem allgemeinen und individuellen Interesse getan? Wo seid ihr sittlich gewesen, ohne interessiert zu sein, ohne unsittliche, egoistische Motive im Hintergrund zu hegen?”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Nachdem die liberale Ökonomie ihr Bestes getan hatte, um durch die Auflösung der Nationalitäten die Feindschaft zu verallgemeinern, die Menschheit in eine Horde reißender Tiere - und was sind Konkurrenten anders? - zu verwandeln, die einander ebendeshalb auffressen, WEIL jeder mit allen andern gleiches Interesse hat, nach dieser Vorarbeit blieb ihr nur noch ein Schritt zum Ziele übrig, die Auflösung der Familie. Um diese durchzusetzen, kam ihr eine eigene schöne Erfindung, das Fabriksystem, zu Hülfe.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Die Nachfrage des Ökonomen ist nicht die wirkliche Nachfrage, seine Konsumtion ist eine künstliche. Dem Ökonomen ist nur der ein wirklich Fragender, ein wirklicher Konsument, der für das, was er empfängt, ein Äquivalent zu bieten hat.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Der ganze Unterschied gegen die alte, offenherzige Sklaverei ist nur der, dass der heutige Arbeiter frei zu sein scheint, weil er nicht auf einmal verkauft wird, sondern stückweise, pro Tag, pro Woche, pro Jahr, und weil nicht ein Eigenthümer ihn dem andern verkauft, sondern er sich selbst auf diese Weise verkaufen muss, da er ja nicht der Sklave eines Einzelnen, sondern der ganzen besitzenden Klasse ist.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “How is it possible that the poorer classes can remain healthy and have a reasonable expectation of life under such conditions? What can one expect but that they should suffer from continual outbreaks of epidemics and an excessively low expectation of life? The physical condition of the workers shows a progressive deterioration.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. ... The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.”

  Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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