"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."
"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."
3 likes
Source: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1970). “The German Ideology”, p.47, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Friedrich Engels
"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."
"What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor."
"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."
"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."
"Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves."