Friedrich Engels

Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds from facts and not from principles.

The development of large-scale industry has not only created the classes which are revolutionary, but has also created the means of their liberation.

In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

The modern individual is a product of social relations, not an isolated atom.

The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.

The philistine is a man who regards the world as existing for him alone.

The abolition of private property is the necessary consequence of the development of industry.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

It is not enough to be a revolutionary. One must also be a good shot.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which earthly forces assume the form of supernatural forces.

Life is movement, and movement is life.

The abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

The first great division of labour, that between town and country, condemned the rural population to thousands of years of mental stupor, and the urban population to the domination of each individual by his particular craft.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

The beer was usually bad, the gin always terrible, and the company on intellectual topics was not stimulating.

A proletarian forced to exist under such conditions is truly a being without will, without self-respect, without any sense of responsibility.