Friedrich Engels Quotes

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

The state is no more than a machine for oppression of one class by another. This is as true of democracy as it is of monarchy.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

Revolution applies a local anaesthetic to one class of society and operates on the other.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for suppressing another.

The lower middle classes as well as the peasants, … always side with the strongest

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

In 'A Hijacking,' the characters are low-status people.

In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not?

We have a wider political and economic system in which ancient, landed power still carries immense weight. There is nothing some landowners would like more than to set the police on those who dare to venture into their vast estates.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.