Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels

Philosopher, Political Theorist

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher and social scientist, co-author of 'The Communist Manifesto,' who analyzed class struggles and capitalism.

Class Mean Science Law Political Struggle
Born
November 28, 1820
Died
August 5, 1895
Quotes
63
Rank
#124

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Friedrich Engels quotes (page 2 of 4)

63 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"Competition permits the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own little garden or field; the workers are compelled to accept any piece wages offered to them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all, and they could not live from the products of their small-scale agriculture alone, and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment."

Garden Hands Agriculture
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1795 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged."

War Wrath Ideas
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed."

Individual
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"In a political struggle of class against class, organization of trade unions is the most important weapon."

Struggle Class Organization
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"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."

Mean Order Class
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly."

Mean Blood Law
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"All that is real in human history becomes irrational in the process of time."

Real Process Irrational
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?"

Science Essence Brain
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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."

Sex Men Class
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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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."

Revenge People Use
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"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."

Men Political Next
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature."

Views Nomenclature Statistics
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; the manufacturer does not force them to take his materials and his cards, but he says to them..'If you don't like to be frizzled in my frying- pan, you can take a walk into the fire."

Fire Doe Frying Pans
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain."

Years Victory World
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune."

Mean Organization Paris
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"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."

Air Cities Way
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"In 10 years, this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation - the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half annexed already socially - hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern."

Country Years Half
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"But the most horrible spot .... lies....immediately south west of Oxford Road and is known as Little Ireland. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench....must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity."

Lying Dark Race
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"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."

Taken Thinking Reality
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Friedrich Engels Philosopher, Political Theorist
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"The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of societythe taking possession of the means of production in the name of societythis 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."

Mean Independent Government
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