Friedrich Engels Quotes

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

The revolution... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

The knowing minority had to impose its will on the majority, even by brute force. The great mass, the workers, are in economic slavery. They cannot accomplish their own liberation. Their minds are formed by their masters; they are incapable of understanding their true interests. It is left to the knowing minority to free the mass from the tutelage of its present masters. Only after this is done will the mass understand.

Only idiots think that the proletariat will win a majority right away. First we topple the bourgeoisie. Then we seize power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it.

The history of all hither-to-existing society is the history of class struggles.

If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both 'The Americans' and 'House of Cards' is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals.

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

I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.

Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

Many workers already realize that the rule of the Socialist or Communist party will be only the concealed form of the rule of the bourgeois class in which the exploitation and suppression of the working class remains.

All past history with the exception of the primitive stages was the history of class struggles.

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

Harmony? No! Class war! Hatred to the death for the criminal bourgeoisie!

Organize, transport your class antagonisms from the economic sphere, where they are perpetrated against you, where they alone can succeed. Take power, become the master of the state. Then, instead of being subject to capitalist law you will make socialist law.

The collectivizations and socializations in the economy count for nothing when State power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

History is made in the class struggle and not in bed.

England, the country that turns whole nations into its proletarians … seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break.

The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.

The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.

The accumulated experience of mankind in the struggle against exploitation, synthesized in Marxism, enabled the Mozambican revolutionary movement to benefit from and absorb that experience.