Friedrich Engels quotes

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, social scientist, and political theorist, widely recognized for his collaboration with Karl Marx. Together, they co-authored several influential works, including The Communist Manifesto. He played a key role in the development of Marxist theory and supported workers' movements across Europe. Here are 97 of his quotes:

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

Friedrich Engels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friedrich Engels

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

The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

Friedrich Engels

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

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

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

Friedrich Engels

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

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

Friedrich Engels

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

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

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

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

Friedrich Engels

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

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

Some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society. Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow.

Friedrich Engels