Quotes from Friedrich Engels

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

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

All history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

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

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

Life is the mode of action of proteins.

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

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

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

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

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.

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

Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

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.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

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

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.

The state is not abolished, it withers away.

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

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.

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.

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

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