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 ENGELSWe 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.
More Friedrich Engels Quotes
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The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.
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 -
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.
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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 -
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.
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 -
Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.
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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 -
I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS -
What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS -
It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS -
Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
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.
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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 -
No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS