Friedrich Engels

The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the cleavage of society into classes, this cleavage made the state a necessity.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

But the revolution is not merely a question of seizing power; it is also a question of radically transforming the whole of society, of creating new social relations and a new morality.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

The first great division of labour between the two sexes had for its basis simply the difference of sex, and the first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The whole of history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature.

It is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought.

The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes.

The world is not to be interpreted, but to be changed.

The English working class is, after all, only a branch of the German working class.

An ounce of action is worth a pound of theory.

We are not dealing with a simple economic doctrine but with a new world outlook.