The 95 best phrases of Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels He was a famous German sociologist, philosopher and journalist born during the year 1820, in what was formerly Prussia.

This sociologist together with his friend and collaborator Karl Marx, he was one of the main ideologues of what we know today as Socialism and Communism. Not surprisingly, Engels helped write the famous book entitled "The Communist Manifesto" and financially supported Marx so that he could write his other great work, "Capital".

During his life he was always related to people who were supporters of the same ideology and also fought actively in the class struggle, being one of the greatest political leaders of La Primera International.

• It may interest you: "The 90 best famous phrases of Karl Marx"

Great famous phrases of Friedrich Engels

Many of you will have heard a lot about him or have read any of his books, but would you like to know the most relevant phrases he said or wrote throughout his life?

Below you will find a selection of the best phrases of Friedrich Engels, possibly one of the most relevant sociologists in history.

1. A people that oppresses another people cannot be free.

The freedom of the peoples must always be inseparable from all of them.

2. When it is possible to speak of freedom, the State as such will cease to exist.

In order to have complete freedom, the State, without a doubt, must cease to exist. Well, the State in one way or another always has some kind of control over us.

3. An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

For an idea to become a reality, action will always be necessary.

4. A change in quantity also implies a change in quality.

If we want to create a product and distribute it on a large scale, quality will always be compromised.

5. The executive of the modern State is nothing more than a committee to administer the common affairs of the entire bourgeoisie.

As we see in this Engels quote, he thought that political power always belonged in some way to the bourgeoisie.

6. In reality, each mental image of the world system is and remains limited, objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by the physical and mental constitution of its author.

The workings of society is so complicated that we will never fully understand how it works. There will always be some nuance that escapes us.

7. The proletariat uses the State not in the interest of freedom, but to suppress its adversaries, and as soon as it is possible to speak of freedom, the State as such ceases to exist.

Engels was in favor of the fact that once the working class had control over the State, it should dissolve it. Well, the State was seen by this sociologist as a great control tool.

8. Everything must justify its existence before the court of Reason, or renounce its existence.

Thanks to the power of reason, human society has been able to evolve enormously over the years. The collaboration of philosophers has always been crucial, since the beginnings of Western civilization.

9. Some state laws intended to curb crime are even more criminal.

The law can be manipulated by the powerful so that it is always beneficial, this is something that also often happens today.

10. Without analysis, there is no synthesis.

In order to fully understand any matter, we must first have a great deal of information about it.

11. The free development of each one is the condition for the free development of all.

We must all have the same right to education, as this education will allow us to prosper in the future.

12. Labor is the source of all wealth, say political economists. And it really is the source, along with nature, that provides them with the material that makes them rich. But it is infinitely more than this. It is the main basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a certain sense, we have to say that work created man himself.

Since the creation of the first city-states and the appearance of agriculture, work has always accompanied man.

13. From day one to this moment, greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

The desire to possess wealth, without a doubt, made the economic system pick up a great speed. Without this desire, the current international economy would not be possible.

14. I gave up the company and dinners, the port wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure hours almost exclusively to intercourse with mere working men; I'm happy and proud to have done it. I am glad, because thus they induced me to spend many happy hours to obtain a knowledge of the realities of life, many hours, that otherwise would have been wasted in conversations of fashion and etiquette tired; proud, because thus I had the opportunity to do justice to a class of oppressed and slandered men who, with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, they still have the respect of all but a money pusher English.

A really curious quote from Engels, which gives us the opportunity to learn really intimate aspects of him.

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

Since the economy became important during the first civilizations, the class struggle has always been present in one form or another.

16. As Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late 1970s: all I know is that I am not a Marxist.

We must not let them pigeonhole us, throughout our lives we can always evolve and change our minds. Our perspective can always change over the years.

17. In this sense, the theory of the communists can be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.

For the communists, private property had no reason to exist, it had to pass after the revolution into the hands of the State.

18. Women's emancipation will only be possible when women can participate in production on a large scale, and housework no longer claims more than a negligible amount of their time.

During the 19th century, women had a very specific role, the main tasks of which were caring for the home and supervising the children.

19. It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of free love comes to the fore.

Love has always been very important to all human beings. As we can see, this dream of free love was not born during the 60s with The Beatles.

20. We have no compassion and we do not ask for compassion. When our turn comes, we will not make excuses for terror. But the real terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, contemptuous and petty, in theory cowardly, secretive and deceitful, and in both senses they are bad reputation…

Marx signed together with Engels a letter in which these harsh sentences were written, without a doubt, they were totally ready to go to the end with their ideas.

21. Nature is the proof of dialectic, and for modern science it must be said that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials that are increasing daily.

The exploitation of nature has always generated a great source of wealth, for the capitalist system profit has always been the primary objective.

22. All past history was the history of class struggles; that these warrior classes of society are always the product of the modes of production and exchange.

The class struggle has gone unnoticed for a long time, as the powerful have always sought to have great control over the poor, both physically and intellectually.

23. The way in which modern society treats the vast mass of the poor is truly scandalous. They are taken to large cities where they breathe fouler air than in the countryside that remains to them.

With the industrial revolution, the poor went from living in the countryside to living confined to very small spaces in the big cities. The quality of life of these, without a doubt, was seriously diminished with this change.

24. Freedom does not consist in a dreamed independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility that this entails of making them work systematically towards ends defined.

We must all do our part so that society can improve, evolution depends on all of us, both rich and poor.

25. Instead of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we will have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

We must all have the same rights within society, the power that other people have does not have to come to harm our standard of living.

26. People think that he has taken an extraordinarily bold step when he has thrown off the belief in hereditary monarchy and has sworn to the democratic republic.

As we can see, the republic was not viewed favorably by Engels, the State would always be equally oppressive regardless of who held power.

27. 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 salaried workers who, having no means of production of their own, are forced to sell their labor power in order to live.

A phrase that perfectly explains the vision that Engels had about the functioning of society. A way of thinking that, without a doubt, many of us share today.

28. Political power, properly speaking, is simply the organized power of one class to oppress another.

The powerful always oppress the weak, this is something that has always happened throughout history. Even in the days of the ancient caves, the strongest always had the upper hand.

29. The ancient Greek philosophers were all natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopedic intellect among them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectical thought.

Engels knew how to draw inspiration from the best thinkers, in order to develop intellectually.

30. In a people's war, the means used by the insurgent nation cannot be measured by the rules commonly recognized regular warfare, nor by any other abstract rule, but rather by the degree of civilization that nation reached insurgent.

The winning side of a war does not have to be the most positive for society as a whole. Wars are, without a doubt, totally undesirable situations.

31. We find two large gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of state power and exploit it for the most corrupt: the nation is powerless against these two big cartels of politicians who are apparently their servants, but in reality they dominate and plunder that.

This phrase speaks to us very well about the so-called bipartisanship, a situation in which both decisions are equally counterproductive.

32. Ideas often catch fire, like electric sparks.

Ideas can arise at any time, we must know how to take advantage of them. Carrying a pen and paper with us can help us so that we don't forget any of them.

33. One day, no doubt, we will 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical movements in the brain; Is that why the essence of thought is exhausted?

The brain is a really complex biological machine, which we do not fully understand. Perhaps the brain is the most mysterious organ of the human being.

34. Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; discovered the simple fact, hitherto hidden by an excessive growth of ideology, that humanity must eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before he can engage in politics, science, religion, art, etc

The human being tried in the first instance to secure his most essential resources, after he achieved this fact he began to develop his intellect in a much faster way.

35. The State is not abolished, it withers.

According to Engels, when the propitious moment arrived, the State would cease to be necessary for our society.

36. Freedom is the recognition of necessity.

In order to be free, we must first be aware of the need we have to be. The best cage is the one that the animal cannot perceive.

37. The State is nothing more than an instrument of oppression of one class towards another, it is no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

Regardless of who runs a country, his actions will always favor the rich and powerful. Well, the powerful always have the necessary means to be able to influence any leader.

38. Are they accusing us of wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

Children, without a doubt, should not work, childhood should only be for playing and being able to develop intellectually.

39. What each individual wants is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one wanted.

All material goods necessarily need human labor to be able to be built or elaborated. Our material desires will most likely go through labor exploitation by third parties.

40. The abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary... The result can only be the victory of the proletariat.

In the communist system private property had to be eliminated, everything had to be possible for the sake of an imminent victory of the working class.

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

Time changes everything, it changes people, tastes, fashions, and it changes society itself from its base.

42. Christianity, especially Protestantism, is the appropriate religion for a society dominated by commodity production.

According to this famous sociologist, Protestantism was possibly the best religion that capitalism could possess.

43. Mathematical infinity occurs in reality... We have, then, an infinity not only of the first degree but also of the second degree and we can leave in charge of the imagination of the readers the construction of new infinities of a higher degree in the space.

In this quote, Engels tells us about the concept of infinity, a concept that can hypothetically occur in nature but of which we are still not completely sure.

44. Religion is nothing more than a fantastic reflection, in the heads of men, of the external powers that dominate their daily existence. A reflection in which earthly forces take the form of superterrestrial ones.

Man has always sought answers to his questions and religion gave him answers at the time that he could understand.

45. The entire history of human society, up to the present, is a history of class struggle.

The class struggle has always been present in the life of the human being, but it had always gone unnoticed due to its complexity.

46. Tremble, if you will, the ruling classes, at the prospect of a communist revolution. The proletarians, with her, have nothing to lose, except their chains. They have, instead, a whole world to win.

The revolution was a highly romantic idea, which promised a better life for the poorest and most destitute in society.

47. The logic of thought must always come to the aid of insufficient knowledge.

As Francis Bacon said, knowledge is power, thanks to it we can improve our lives and the lives of others.

48. The rapid progress of civilization was attributed exclusively to the head, to the development and activity of the brain.

The human intellect has always been a vital aspect, especially for the correct development of our society.

49. The hand of man has reached that degree of perfection that has made it capable of giving life, as if by magic, to Raphael's paintings, Thorwaldsen's statues and Paganini's music.

The human being has shown to have a great gift for the arts, since since ancient times he has always been able to amaze us with his wonderful works.

50. First work, then and with it the articulated word, were the two main stimuli under the influence of which the monkey brain gradually transformed into the human brain.

Since the creation of the first tools, the human being has never stopped working, our brain seems to need constant activity in order to develop.

51. Terrors are, for the most part, useless cruelties committed out of fear.

The greatest horrors have always been the result of the people themselves, we must never let ourselves be carried away by fear or by third parties.

52. We, by our flesh, our blood, and our brains, belong to nature, we find ourselves in her bosom, and everything our mastery over it consists in the fact that, unlike other beings, we are capable of knowing its laws and applying them.

Undoubtedly, the human being has a greater knowledge of the natural environment and knows how to make better use of its resources than any other animal species.

53. The only thing that animals can do is use external nature and modify it by the mere fact of their presence in it. Man, on the other hand, modifies nature and thus forces it to serve him, dominates it.

The human being has come to think that he can dominate the elements, a way of thinking that has been extremely expensive for us on more than one occasion.

54. The way in which the great mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous.

The poor have always been mistreated and neglected, but this must change. All people deserve to have the same rights and obligations, respect being the main premises.

55. The British working class is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this nation, the most bourgeois of all, seems to tend eventually to create a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat.

With the advent of prosperity, the working class and the bourgeois class find similarities with each other, similarities that a financial crisis will immediately disappear.

56. Marx was, above all, a revolutionary.

Engels and Marx firmly believed that society could be better for all its citizens, an idea that many of us undoubtedly share today.

57. Thanks to the cooperation of the hand, the organs of speech and the brain, not only in each individual, but also in society, men were learning to carry out operations more and more complicated, to consider and to achieve objectives more and more elevated.

The human being is, without a doubt, an incredible species, nobody knows where it will arrive with its continuous development.

58. A revolution is needed that completely transforms the mode of production that exists until today and, with it, the current social order.

A possible revolution could end up leading to a communist reform, something that Engels fervently wanted.

59. Work is the basic and fundamental condition of all human life. And it is to such a degree that, up to a certain point, we must say that work has created man himself.

Work is an essential part of everyone's life, thanks to it many of us discover who we really are and how far we want to go.

60. The work begins with the development of instruments.

With the creation of the first tools, the first craftsmen arose, thus creating the first trade.

61. A revolution is a natural phenomenon governed by physical laws different from the rules that govern the development of society in normal times.

A revolution is always produced by a series of previous events, without these events, the revolution would have no reason to exist.

62. The materialist conception of History starts from the preposition that the production of the means for the maintenance of human life, and, after production, the change of the things produced, constitute the basis of the entire structure social.

Capitalism focuses all the development of its society on the production, distribution and commercialization of its products. Materialism in this system is vital to its survival.

63. So much prudence is needed to govern an empire, like a house.

A simple and direct sentence. To govern a country a great dose of prudence is necessary.

64. Monogamy does not appear in any way in the story as a reconciliation between man and woman.

Engels was not a supporter of monogamy, throughout his life it was spoken of negatively on more than one occasion.

65. But at the same time he inaugurates, along with slavery and private wealth, that era that lasts to this day and in which each progress is at the same time a relative return and the well-being and development of some are verified at the expense of pain and the repression of others.

Society seemed to have been unfair from its inception. Engels decided to dedicate all his efforts to the class struggle, his contribution being essential to the future empowerment of the proletariat.

66. The alliance between the government and the Stock Market is achieved with greater ease, the more the State's debts grow and the more concentrating in their hands joint stock companies, not only transportation, but also production itself, making the Stock Market their center.

The manipulation of the economy by the State was, according to this famous sociologist, something extremely evident.

67. The sale of children by the father: This was the first fruit of parental right and monogamy!

A very harsh phrase and also completely true, in ancient times parents were able to sell their own children in exchange for food.

68. Owners of the public force and the right to collect taxes, officials, as organs of society, now appear to be situated above it.

Officials have always held a relevant social position, being seen with very bad eyes by some thinkers.

69. According to Bachofen, it was not the development of the real conditions of existence of men, but the religious reflection of those conditions. conditions in their brains, which determined the historical changes in the reciprocal social situation of man and society. women.

Religion has always been decisive in the role that men and women have adopted in society. society, often attributing these roles in a totally arbitrary way according to their own interest.

70. Heterism is a social institution like any other and maintains the old sexual freedom... for the benefit of men. In fact, not only tolerated, but freely practiced, especially by the ruling classes, the word is condemned.

Engels was a great defender of individual sexual freedoms, something that, without a doubt, was not very common in those days.

71. The social classes of the ninth century had not been formed with the decline of a dying civilization, but in the birth pangs of a new civilization.

The 9th century was a turning point, society entered a period of modernization which changed the way people lived forever.

72. The characteristic feature of the period of barbarism is the domestication and breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants.

We may think of our ancestors as barbarians, but their cattle raising and agriculture laid the foundations of modern society.

73. Monogamy was a great historical progress.

The monogamy established by the church shortened the rights of people. But it also prevented a possible health crisis.

74. The overthrow of mother-right was the great historical defeat of the female sex throughout the world.

The role of women was not as relevant as that of men, and they also had full custody of all their children.

75. The first class antagonism that appeared in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamy.

Engels saw similarities between the class struggle and the struggle between genders, the system of patriarchy being something that socialism also had to do away with.

76. In nature nothing happens in isolation. Each phenomenon affects another and is, in turn, influenced by it; and it is generally the forgetfulness of this movement and of this universal interaction that prevents our naturalists from perceiving clearly the simplest things.

In nature, any small change can have a great impact, nothing happens in the environment without having a compelling reason behind it.

77. From the point and time it was founded, we see it in the intermediate form of the patriarchal family, which arose at that time. What characterizes, above all, this family is not polygamy, which we will talk about later, but the organization of a certain number of individuals, free and not free, in a family subject to the paternal power of the head of this

Families have always had a hierarchy in their composition imposed by the church in past times. This hierarchy affects all the people who are within that same family nucleus, coming to determine their duties and privileges.

78. In Gayo's time the 'family, id is patrimonium' (that is, inheritance), was still transmitted by will. This expression was invented by the Romans to designate a new social organism, whose head had under his power the wife, children and a certain number of slaves, with Roman parental authority and the right of life and death over all.

The father or head of the family had full control over the assets of the entire family. He being the only one who could leave them as an inheritance after his death.

79. And that power, born of society, but which rises above it and divorces it more and more, is the State.

Engels oriented a large part of his ideas towards the disappearance of the State as we know it.

80. In grammar two denials are equivalent to an affirmation, in the same way in conjugal morality two prostitutions are equivalent to a virtue.

A really curious phrase that many of us undoubtedly expected from this philosopher. What is moral and what is not will ultimately depend on our personal values.

81. There was a primitive stage in which sexual commerce prevailed within the tribe promiscuous, so that each woman belonged equally to all men and each man to all women.

In the time of the caves, the entire tribe procreated among themselves, regardless of the individual rank that each one had within it.

82. If the Catholic Church has abolished divorce, it is probably because it will have recognized that for adultery, as against death, there is no valid remedy.

Adultery has always been present within society, this being one of the biggest problems that have always existed within the family.

83. The man also took the reins in the house; the woman saw herself degraded, turned into the servant, the slave of the man's lust, into a simple instrument of reproduction. This low condition of women, which is manifested above all among the Greeks of heroic times, and even more so in those of classics, it has been gradually touched up, disguised and, in certain places, even covered in softer forms, but not, far from it, abolished.

Undoubtedly, women did not have in the past the recognition and relevance that they really should have within society.

84. The possessing class rules directly through universal suffrage. While the oppressed class (in our case the proletariat) is not ripe to liberate itself, its majority recognizes today's social order as the only possible one, and politically forms the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left.

Society must need to change, so that it contemplates the possibility of evolving. If the proletariat is not aware of the injustice it suffers, it will never reveal itself.

85. The same new society, throughout the two thousand five hundred years of its existence, has never been more than the development of a tiny minority at the expense of an immense majority of the exploited and oppressed; and this is today more than ever.

The capitalist system seeks to obtain the maximum benefit for a few and use the human labor of the rest of society. According to the ideas of Friedrich Engels, this would not be the case with an economic system based on socialism.

86. Everything that is real in human history becomes irrational in the course of time.

What may be valid for a certain period of time can later become unintelligible.

87. It is absolutely impossible to calculate what the militant proletariat of Europe and America and historical science have lost with this man.

In this fragment he refers to the death of Karl Marx and his great contribution to the liberation of the world working class.

88. And he died revered, loved, mourned by millions of workers of the revolutionary cause, like him, scattered throughout Europe and America, from the mines of Siberia to California.

For Engels, Marx was one of the greatest revolutionaries in history.

89. But there was not a single field that Marx did not subject to investigation - and these fields were many, and they were not he merely touched on a single one in passing - including mathematics, in which he made no discoveries original

Throughout his career, Engels also dedicated himself to praising the figure of Marx.

90. For this reason, Marx was the most hated and slandered man of his time. Governments, both absolutists and republicans, expelled him. The bourgeois, both the conservatives and the ultra-democrats, competed to launch slander against him

Both Marx and Engels were highly politically persecuted figures for their revolutionary activity.

91. If there were no French women, life would not be worth living.

Some of his observations of the society of his time are truly interesting.

92. On March 14, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, he stopped thinking the greatest thinker of our days.

Fragment of the "Speech at the grave of Marx", one of the most moving writings of all his work.

93. Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first workers' government in history.

94. Are you accusing us of wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

Stopping the exploitation of man by man was one of the tasks that both Engels and Marx undertook.

95. Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto hidden by a excessive growth of the ideology that humanity must first of all eat, drink, be sheltered and clothed, before it can engage in politics, science, art, religion etc

As an intellectual that he was, Engels admired the contributions of other great scientists such as Darwin.