Beperken Engels Quotes

Capitalist production ... was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this. ~ Friedrich Engels

Without analysis, no synthesis. ~ Friedrich Engels

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.
Quoted in The Situationists and the City, pg. 194 ~ Friedrich Engels

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. ~ Friedrich Engels

This trail is never-changing, it won't lead you astray. It won't always be easy to follow and at times it will look too narrow for your paws. Follow it anyway, and you'll overcome every challenge you face." -Faolan ~ Brittany L. Engels

The first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first class oppression with that of the female by the male sex. ~ Friedrich Engels

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. ~ Friedrich Engels

Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel.
On the comparative anatomy of angels. ~ Gustav Fechner

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

As Engels memorably put it: "The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. ~ Anonymous

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

Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth, and wealth again; wealth not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim. ~ Friedrich Engels

Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more. ~ Rachel Holmes

Why does he call you spider?"

"It's a little out of date, actually. When I first met Engels - when I first fell in with that whole crowd, in fact - I would sit with a book in my lap, or something else that I wasn't really paying attention to, so that I could pretend to be doing something else while I listened to the arguments. One evening someone said something particularly indefensible. And I'd got so comfortable that I objected out loud."

James was smiling, too, his head a little to one side as if he were watching the past as I described it.

"In the awful silence that followed - no, don't laugh, it really was awful at the time - Engels said, "I believe our spider has finished her web. Think before you speak, my friends. Fools are her lawful prey."

"Sitting in corners, observing everything, catching everything, and never letting it get away." James shook his head, still smiling. "You must be the only woman on the face of the earth who understands that that's a compliment. ~ Steven Brust

The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism ... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes. ~ Christopher Hitchens

It was also necessary to answer those who objected to the fact that the revolution itself had need of an administrative
and repressive apparatus. There again Marx and Engels are largely used to prove, authoritatively, that the proletarian
State is not a State organized on the lines of other states, but a State which, by definition, is in the process of
withering away. "As soon as there is no longer a social class which must be kept oppressed ... a State ceases to be
necessary. The first act by which the [proletarian] State really establishes itself as the representative of an entire
society - the seizure of the society's means of production - is, at the same time, the last real act of the State. For the
government of people is substituted the administration of things. . . . The State is not abolished, it perishes." The
bourgeois State is first suppressed by the proletariat. Then, but only then, the proletarian State fades away. The
dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary - first, to crush or suppress what remains of the bourgeois class;
secondly, to bring about the socialization of the means of production. Once these two tasks are accomplished, it
immediately begins to wither away. ~ Albert Camus

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

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. ~ Friedrich Engels

It was always our view that in order to attain this [proletarian revolution] and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organised political power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organise society anew. ~ Friedrich Engels

What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say "I am not a Marxist"? ~ Jacques Derrida

Books are constantly changing the world. If you're a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don't you see? This world is constantly being altered by books. ~ John Connolly

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

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual –and that will be the end of it. ~ Friedrich Engels

They say that the Soviet delegates smile. That smile is genuine. It is not artificial. We wish to live in peace, tranquility. But if anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin he deceives himself poorly. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle. ~ Nikita Khrushchev

Bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. ~ Friedrich Engels

With the pairing family, therefore, the abduction and barter of women began - widespread symptoms, and nothing but that, of a new and much more profound change. ~ Friedrich Engels

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. ~ Friedrich Engels

But the degradation of the women was avenged in the men and degraded them also, until they sank into the abomination of boy-love. ~ Friedrich Engels

The British Labour movement is today, and for many years has been, working in a narrow circle of strikes that are looked upon, not as an expedient, and not as a means of propaganda, but as an ultimate aim. ~ Friedrich Engels

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

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

Ideas often kindle each other, like electrical sparks. ~ Friedrich Engels

Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. ~ 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

No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations. ~ Friedrich Engels

This police force consisted--of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service. ~ Friedrich Engels

The state is not abolished, it withers away. ~ Friedrich Engels