74 Quotes by Friedrick Engels

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

We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends – the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

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.

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

Production has become a social act. Exchange and appropriation continue to be individual acts, the acts of individuals. The social product is appropriated by the individual capitalist. Fundamental contradiction, whence arise all the contradictions in which our present-day society moves, and which modern industry brings to light.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages.

Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.

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