74 Quotes by Friedrick Engels

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

It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground.

The state is not abolished, it withers away.

Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late ’seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.

Firstly, the farmers, the most stupid set of people in existence, who, clinging to feudal prejudices, burst forth in masses, ready to die rather than cease to obey those whom they, their fathers and grandfathers, had called their masters; and submitted to be trampled on and horse-whipped by.

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

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.

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.

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