Friedrich Engels Quotes

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.

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

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

Subordinate classes have usually pushed for democracy, dominant classes nearly always have resisted it.

There are two Americas. One which influences government and economic policy and the other which must live with the results.

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

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.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

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 web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

The Tea Party is but one manifestation of a widening perception that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

You need just the right amount of protection for the rich under democracy: too little and the elite will not agree to democracy; too much and the poor will go ahead and have the revolution...

The Americans equally detest the pageantry of a king and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop.

Every class struggle is a political struggle

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

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