Best Engels Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Ndugu zangu, malaika wanatulinda. Wako katikati ya maadui zetu na sisi. Hatujui ni mara ngapi malaika wameingilia kati kuokoa maisha yetu, kutuepusha na nguvu za Shetani na malaika wake wakorofi. Lakini nina hakika ya kwamba wamefanya hivyo mara nyingi katika mazingira ambapo aghalabu sisi huwa hatuelewi.”

Our Lives Satan Enemies Brethren Shetani Engels Maadui Malaika Maisha Yetu Ndugu Zangu

Author:Enock Maregesi

“The success of Communism naturally depends on altering human nature because few things are more inherent in human nature than the ownership of property. This basic human right is as ancient as the ten commandments where God ordained that 'Thou Shall Not Steal'. The commandment implicitly acknowledges that persons have possessions and that they have an inherent right to that property. So it is thus not permissible for others to take it away from them. But Marx & Engels weren't about to admit the right to private property that we find even in the bible.”

Communism Holy Bible Marx Engels Private Property Rights

Book:The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism

Source: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism

“Bolshevik intellectuals did not confine their reading to Marxist works. They knew Russian and European literature and philosophy and kept up with current trends in art and thoughts. Aspects of Nietzsche’s thought were either surprisingly compatible with Marxism or treated issues that Marx and Engels had neglected. Nietzsche sensitized Bolsheviks committed to reason and science to the importance of the nonrational aspects of the human psyche and to the psychpolitical utility of symbol, myth, and cult. His visions of “great politics” (grosse Politik) colored their imaginations. Politik, like the Russian word politika, means both “politics” and “policy”; grosse has also been translated as “grand” or “large scale.” The Soviet obsession with creating a new culture stemmed primarily from Nietzsche, Wagner, and their Russian popularizers. Marx and Engels never developed a detailed theory of culture because they considered it part of the superstructure that would change to follow changes in the economic base.”

Russia Nietzsche Marx Engels

Book:New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism

Source: New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism

“I know him by another name. His real one is Slem, not uncommon for men of his generation. It stands for Stalin Lenin Engels Marx. He's always making up new names for himself--wouldn't you?”

Marx Stalin Engels Lenin Slem

Book:Performance Anomalies

Source: Performance Anomalies

“Die Proletarier dieser Welt haben nichts zu verlieren als ihre Ketten. Sie haben eine Welt zu gewinnen. Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!”

Communism Rising Communist Proletariat Marx Engels Proletarian

Author:Karl Marx

“The entirety of Marxism from top to bottom was established by means of the dialectical materialist method. In literally any work of Marx and Engels it is therefore both possible and necessary to study the logic of their thinking and the theory of knowledge which they consciously employed – dialectics. This must be studied not only in their writings, but in the real logic of the political struggle which they conducted throughout their entire lives. For dialectics is the logic not only of research, and not only of the unity of scientific works; it is also a logic of real causes which comes to life and enters into battle, finding realisation in whatever are the truly real causes changing the face of the surrounding world.”

Marxism Dialectics Marx Engels

Author:Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov

“Marx, Engels, and Lenin have carried on the tradition of rational and non-mystical approach to all human problems; this is the tradition of the best Greek philosophers and the founders of modern science. Careful analysis; separation of factors; the following of causes into their effects; reliance on experiments; all are taken over into Marxism and provide it with a hard scientific core. There is nowhere any pandering to special intuitions or spiritual experiences.”

Science Marxism Engels Lenin Dialectical Materialism

Book:Engels and Science

Source: Engels and Science

“Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it”

Socialism Communism Marxism Marx Engels

Book:Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

Source: Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

“Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”

Socialism Communism Marxism Marx Engels

Book:Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

Source: Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

“Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deductions from the nature of the parties and the circumstances one has to deal with in such a case, are so plain and simple that the short experience of 1848 had made the Germans pretty well acquainted with them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of organization, discipline, and habitual authority: unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy which the first successful rising has given to you; rally those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!”

Revolution Marx Engels

Author:Karl marx and friedrich engels

“Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of identification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is found in those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the ‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizations of these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing, subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideas of natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the ‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected with these new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical materialism”

Philosophy Science Religion Idealism Marx Engels Lenin Dialectical Materialism Obscurantism Positivist Science

Book:Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics

Source: Intelligent Materialism: Essays on Hegel and Dialectics

“In 1858 Engels sarcastically described the tamed British workers in the bluntest terms: "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a na- tion which exploits the whole world this is to a certain ex- tent justifiable." (2) Britain was the Imperial Rome, the Amerikan Empire of that day - a nation which "feasted" on the exploitation of colonies around the entire world. Engels, as a communist, didn't make lame excuses for the corrupted English workers, but exposed them. He held the English workers accountable to the world proletariat for their sorry political choices.”

Communism Engels Settler Colonialism Sakai

Book:Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

Source: Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

“(On Engels' critique of anti-authoritarianism) “Nobody was talking about the use of revolutionary violence being authoritarianism. That's always been an invalid thing to point out. You know, is a slave rising up and overthrowing their master, is that "authoritarian"? Is a woman trying to escape her abusive husband or defending herself against her abusive husband, is that "authoritarian"?”

Violence Anarchism Dominance Authoritarianism Engels Libertarian Socialism

Author:Anark

“So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.”

Philosophy Socialism Marxism Marx Political Theory Engels Routledge

Author:Alex Callinicos Stathis Kouvelakis Lucia Pradella

“As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it 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.”

Liberty Authority Marx Engels

Author:Friedrich Engels

“Si tratta di pensare in maniera diversa l'esistenza concreta della specie. Non che il tempo passa e noi invecchiamo: noi siamo protagonisti del nostro tempo e costruiamo la nostra vita, giorno per giorno, settimana per settimana, mese per mese, anno per anno, idea per idea, sentimento per sentimento, apprendimento per apprendimento, riflessione per riflessione, espressione per espressione. Allora abbiamo una visione più chiara: quando parliamo di interrelazione universale (lo ha detto anche Engels cercando di realizzare Hegel) non ci riferiamo a una interrelazione universale fatidica e fatale, tutta negativa, che quindi potrà realizzarsi solo attraverso bagni di sangue. Di vittoria in vittoria nascerà una nuova sconfitta, o di sconfitta in sconfitta cerchiamo la vittoria? Questo è il punto, il punto di partenza. Ecco perché non partiamo dal conflitto, non partiamo dalla negazione e non partiamo dalla negazione della negazione. Può sembrare una sfida eccessiva all'obbrobrio, all'oppressione, alla devastazione del sistema, ma è obbligatorio domandarsi: tutti coloro che sono partiti dal conflitto e lo hanno assolutizzato dove sono arrivati, a che conclusioni sono giunti, che strade ci hanno fornito, che chance ci hanno dato? Ci hanno insegnato molto, ma che obiettivo ci propongono? È possibile vincere continuando a partire dal conflitto? E il conflitto non è forse il terreno a cui l'avversario vuole costringerci, non è forse quello che dobbiamo rifiutare, che dobbiamo cercare di superare da tutti i punti di vista? Per esempio: il conflitto di genere c'è, addirittura abbiamo parlato di uno scontro necessario con il marxismo. Tuttavia questo è il punto di partenza o una conseguenza? Il vero punto di partenza è cercare di ricostruire a un livello più alto, nella logica dell'autosuperamento - che contiene profondamente opposizione, contrarietà, contrapposizione, conflitto, ma tende già a superarli -, l'unità della specie, la sua possibilità di sviluppo a un livello superiore. Su questo si gioca tutto. Cominciamo da un sì o cominciamo sui no? E dove andiamo a finire? Da che punto di vista partiamo e dove arriviamo, dove vogliamo arrivare? Questo è un problema filosoficamente molto profondo. Purtroppo Hegel ha fornito le ragioni maggiori di questa dialettica della negatività che dobbiamo cercare di superare d'entrata. Non è soltanto un desiderio (e se già lo fosse sarebbe una cosa molto grande), ha a che fare con tutto il modo in cui pensiamo alla nostra impresa, alla nostra causa, alla nostra vita.”

Source: Per una logica affermativa della specie. Corso introduttivo alla logica

“The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private liberty.”

Liberty Libertarian Socialism Communism Communist Individualism Libertarianism Socialist Marxism Individual Rights Marx Democratic Socialism Engels Lenin

Author:A.E. Samaan

“Those who have been forced to study 'dialectical materialism', the strange concoction that was supposed to form the philosophical foundation of Marxism in the Soviet Union and other countries of socialist camp, will never forget the definition Friedrich Engels gave : Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies. If one sets aside the disgust form the relentless drilling of this formula into our poor brains, along with other jewels of Marxist wisdom, it does not sound so bad now, even if trivial and largely beside the point.”

Engels Dialectical Materialism Proteins

Book:The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

Source: The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution

“From the moment when the bourgeois demand for the abolition of class privileges was put forward, alongside it appeared the proletarian demand for the abolition of the classes themselves. [...] The proletarians took the bourgeoisie at its word: equality must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must also be extended to the social, economic sphere. [...] Any demand for equality which goes beyond that, of necessity passes into absurdity.”

Human Rights Equality Socialism Marxism Engels Anti Duhring

Book:Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science

Source: Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science

“Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, [...] were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to-go on with mechanization anyway. If it didn't happen, it can only be because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would presumably have come as a complete surprise to them.”

Capitalism Bureaucracy Market Marx Engels Bureaucratic Society Managerialism Market Competition

Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Source: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Every chemical compound, according to Engels, comes into existence only at a certain time in the development of the universe when the conditions are appropriate for it; and when it does come into existence it manifests this by entering into its characteristic relations. Neither carbon compounds or proteins are ideal forms, but are themselves witnesses of the conditions on a cooling planet. It is here that occurs his celebrated remark that life is the mode of existence of proteins.”

Communism Biology Marxism Marx Biochemistry Engels Dialectical Materialism

Book:Marx and science

Source: Marx and science

“In the same year as the original Disaster article, Meredeth Turshen attacked the paradigm of clinical medicine as excessively preoccupied with how the individual body reacts to disease, missing the bigger picture of class and other collectivities. She cited Engels’s descriptions of how polluted air, poorly ventilated houses, overcrowded slums and omnipresent sewage predisposed the workers of Manchester to become ill. She could have also quoted Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’ Since the 1970s, critical epidemiology has agreed with critical vulnerability theory on emphasising the social over the natural: disease and disaster as produced through processes internal to society.”

Capitalism Socialism Covid Engels Luxemburg Critical Epidemiology Critical Vulnerability Theory

Book:Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”

Materialism Marxism Marx Engels

Book:Selected Works, Vol 1

Source: Selected Works, Vol 1

“Marx and Engels were right to argue that an unregulated market economy was socially undesirable, but wrong to assume that the replacement of the market by planning would lead to an attractive economic and social system.”

Market Economy Marx Engels

Book:Socialist Planning

Source: Socialist Planning

“The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.”

Thinking Wells Said Energy Force Creativity Creative Written Capitalism Praise Enormous Destructive Admiration Communist Innovative Manifestos Communist Manifesto Engels

Author:Christopher Hitchens

“Capitalism has been fully restored in Yugoslavia, as is well-known, but this capitalism knows how to disguise. Yugoslavia portrays itself as a socialist state, but of a special kind, as the world has never seen it before! The Titoites even boast that their state has nothing in common with the first socialist state which emerged from the socialist October Revolution and which was founded by Lenin and Stalin on the basis of the scientific theory of Marx and Engels.”

“In their day, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin represented the aspirations and demands of the exploited working masses, and the cause of socialism was inseparably linked with their names.”

Names Causes Demand Mass Socialism Aspiration Linked Engels Lenin And Stalin

Author:Kim Jong Il

“In 1962 (Engel v. Vitale), the Supreme Court explained that the word 'church' would no longer mean a federally established denomination; it would now mean a religious activity in public.”

Mean Christian Church Religious Activity Court Supreme Supreme Court Denominations Engels

Author:David Barton

“If anything qualifies as an irony of history it would be this: that Marx and Engels throughout the nineteenth century wrote about America the United States as the great country of the future, of freedom and equality and a good life for the working man, and a country of revolution and emancipation, and of Russia as the great country of despotism, backwardness, savagery and superstition.”

“I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.”

Mets Prison Redeemed Mao Engels Trotsky

Book:Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

Source: Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

“I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.”

Want Class Morning Paper Mark Distinction Papers Engels Class Distinction

Author:Margaret Thatcher

“Marx and Engels openly declared that the progressive income tax and the death tax are 'economically untenable' and that they advocated them only because 'they necessitate further inroads' upon the capitalist system and are 'unavoidable' as a means of bringing about socialism.”

Mean Taxes Income Socialism Progressive Capitalist Income Tax Engels

Author:Ludwig von Mises

“Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization.”

“Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.”

Ifs Thinking Firsts Has Beens Father Knowing Son Source Draws Primaries Biographies Family History Eleanor Biographers Engels Primary Source

Author:Rachel Holmes

“Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.”

Firsts Made Use Home Spirit House Study Seeing Mets Library Including Circles Faculty Bob Frank Guardian Harvard Helen Dublin Circle Of Friends Engels

Author:Seamus Heaney

“The history of humanity is the history of human freedom...Freedom is not, as Engels thought, "the recognition of necessity." Freedom is the opposite of necessity. Freedom is necessity overcome. Progress is, in essence, the progress of human freedom. Yes, and after all, life itself is freedom. The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom.”

Humans Life Is Humanity Progress Evolution Essence Opposites Overcoming Recognition Human Freedom Engels Evolution Of Life

Author:Vasily Grossman

“They say that the Soviet delegates smile. That smile is genuine. It is not artificial. We wish to live in peace, tranquility. But if anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin he deceives himself poorly. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.”

Ifs Believe Wish Waiting Teaching Genuine Communism Soviet Artificial Deceiving Tranquility Abandonment Delegates Shrimp Engels Those Who Wait Peace Tranquility

Author:Nikita Khrushchev

“We are indebted to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin for giving us a weapon. The weapon is not a machine-gun, but Marxism-Leninism.”

Giving Communication Weapons Gun Machines Marxism Indebted Machine Guns Engels Marxism Leninism Lenin And Stalin

Book:On people's democratic dictatorship: written in commemoration of the 28th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, July 1, 1949

Source: On people's democratic dictatorship: written in commemoration of the 28th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, July 1, 1949

“It was the Russians that introduced the Chinese to Marxism. Before the October Revolution, the Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin but did not even know of Marx or Engels. The salvos of the October Revolution awoke us to Marxism-Leninism.”

Knows Communication Revolution Ignorant Chinese Marxism October Engels Marxism Leninism October Revolution Lenin And Stalin

Author:Mao Zedong

“Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel. On the comparative anatomy of angels.”

Angel Anatomy Engels

Author:Gustav Fechner

“This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.”

Writing Liberty Issues Essentials Economics Affair Productions Contemporary Contribution Inability Pseudo Engels

Author:Ludwig von Mises

“In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future.”

Source: Paul Robeson speaks: writings, speeches, interviews, 1918-1974

“The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution. It is not just a matter of understanding the general laws derived by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from their extensive study of real life and revolutionary experience, but of studying their standpoint and method in examining and solving problems.”

Source: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works