Friedrich Engels

The monogamous family does not by any means make its appearance everywhere and always in the same form.

Workers are worse off than slaves, because slaves are at least guaranteed a subsistence.

The Irish are a nation of drunkards with a constitution ruined by brandy.

The Moor [Marx] is in ecstasy—you know how much he loves any kind of row.

The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.

The emancipation of women will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer confines her to a private sphere.

Communists scorn to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!

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.

Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility, therefore, of putting them to work purposefully for definite ends.

In a communist society, the only way in which the family can remain in existence is by ceasing to be the economic unit of society.

The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.

We are not interested in the future for its own sake, but only in so far as it affects the present.

All that is solid melts into air.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Only the proletariat, by abolishing private property itself, will be able to emancipate itself and thereby all other classes of society.

The demand for the abolition of private property is nothing but the expression of the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat.

The more you develop, the more you discover that you are not an individual but merely a part of a collective.

But the state is by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.