Vanzelfsprekend Engels Quotes

Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them..'If you don't like to be frizzled in my frying- pan, you can take a walk into the fire. ~ Friedrich Engels

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. ~ Friedrich Engels

If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living. ~ Friedrich Engels

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

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"It's a little out of date, actually.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 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

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

If the world had ever been in a state in which no change whatever was taking place, how could it pass from this state to one of change? The absolutely unchanging, especially when it has been in this state from eternity, cannot possibly get out of such a state by itself and pass over into a state of motion and change. An initial impulse must have therefore come from outside [ ... ] But as everyone knows, the "initial impulse" is only another expression for God. ~ Friedrich Engels

The problem of the seizure of power brings in its train the problem of the State. The State and the
Revolution (1917), which deals with this subject, is the strangest and most contradictory of pamphlets.
Lenin employs in it his favorite method, which is the method of authority. With the help of Marx and
Engels, he begins by taking a stand against any kind of reformism which would claim to utilize the
bourgeois State - that organism of domination of one class over another. The bourgeois State owes its
survival to the police and to the army because it is primarily an instrument of oppression. It reflects both
the irreconcilable antagonism of the classes and the forcible subjugation of this antagonism. This
authority of fact is only worthy of contempt. ~ Albert Camus

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

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

The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. ~ 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

Don't forget any affront done to you and to all our people, the time of revenge will come and must be put to good use. ~ 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

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

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

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

Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. ~ Rosa Luxemburg

Life is the mode of action of proteins. ~ Friedrich Engels

Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism. ~ Friedrich Engels

The word Familia did not originally signify the ideal of our modern philistine, which is a compound of sentimentality and domestic discord. Among the Romans, in the beginning, it did not even refer to the married couple and their children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means a household slave and familia signifies the totality of slaves belonging to one individual. The expression was invented by the romans to describe a new social organism, the head of which had under him wife and children and a number of slaves, under Roman paternal power, with power of life and death over them all. ~ Friedrich Engels

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought? ~ Friedrich Engels

Rangan came to the surface in the mid-afternoon of Inauguration Day, in the trunk of a car driven by a terrified aide of Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security. ~ Ramez Naam

The state, then, is by no means a power forced on society from outside; neither is it the "realization of the ethical idea," "the image and the realization of reason," as Hegel maintains. It is simply a product of society at a certain stage of evolution. It is the confession that this society has become hopelessly divided against itself, has entangled itself in irreconcilable contradictions which it is powerless to banish. In ~ Friedrich Engels

In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - the shapers of humanity's richest present and future. ~ Paul Robeson

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

All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm ... 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

We must apologise to the readers for returning with such insistence to the Robinson Crusoe and Friday story, which properly belongs to the nursery and not to the field of science - but how can we help it? ~ Friedrich Engels

Go free those held captive, and free the souls who are bound in the darkness." -Driscoll ~ Brittany L. 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

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me. ~ George Jackson

Actually, each mental image of the world system is and remains limited, objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by its author's physical and mental constitution. ~ Friedrich Engels

People have learned by bitter experience that the "European fraternal union of peoples" cannot be achieved by mere phrases and pious wishes, but only by profound revolutions and bloody struggles; they have learned that the question is not that of a fraternal union of all European peoples under a single republican flag, but of an alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary peoples, an alliance which comes into being not on paper, but only on the battlefield. ~ 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

Here monogamy, there hetaerism and its most extreme form, prostitution. Hetaerism is as much a social institution as all others. It continues the old sexual freedom - for the benefit of the men. In reality not only permitted, but also assiduously practised by the ruling class, it is denounced only nominally. Still in practice this denunciation strikes by no means the men who indulge in it, but only the women. These are ostracised and cast out by society, in order to proclaim once more the fundamental law of unconditional male supremacy over the female sex. However, ~ Friedrich Engels

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

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 middle classes have a truly extraordinary conception of society. They really believe that human beings ... have real existence only if they make money or help to make it. ~ Friedrich Engels

Even the head of the military power of a civilized State
must envy the head of the clan whom patriarchal society surrounded with voluntary respect, not with
respect imposed by the club." Moreover, Engels has firmly established that the concept of the State and
the concept of a free society are irreconcilable. "Classes will disappear as ineluctably as they appeared.
With the disappearance of classes, the State will inevitably disappear. The society that reorganizes
production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers will
relegate the machine of State to the place it deserves: to the museum of antiquities, side by side with the spinningwheel
and the bronze ax. ~ Albert Camus

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

After Marx died, Engels denied that Marx had said that 'the economic element is the only determining one'. He and Marx, he conceded, were partly to blame for this misinterpretation, for they had emphasized the economic side in opposition to those who rejected it altogether. ~ Anonymous

Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out. ~ Assata Shakur

In pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learned to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, may be anything else, but they are certainly not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to exclude all properties of the objects considered other than their number-and this ability is the product of a long historical evolution based on experience. Like the idea of number, so the idea of form is derived exclusively from the external world, and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought. ~ Friedrich Engels

...he composed his own quotations from Marx and Engels to confound the most learned communist, and recommended others to do the same. 'Twist the book', he would yell: 'Twist the book, so the Party always wins! ~ Robert Barltrop

If darkness was meant to rule it wouldn't be chased away by the Light." -Sheelagh ~ Brittany L. Engels

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment. ~ 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

If anything qualifies as an irony of history it would be this: that Marx and Engels throughout the nineteenth century wrote about America the United States as the great country of the future, of freedom and equality and a good life for the working man, and a country of revolution and emancipation, and of Russia as the great country of despotism, backwardness, savagery and superstition. ~ Christopher Hitchens