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Friedrich Engels
(28 Nov 1820 - 5 Aug 1895)
German socialist who collaborated with Karl Marx in formulating the theory of communism.
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Science Quotes by Friedrich Engels (9 quotes)
And what is impossible to science?
— Friedrich Engels
'Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy', in K. Marx (ed.), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844), 204.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of idealogy [sic], that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art etc.
— Friedrich Engels
Engels' Speech over the Grave of Karl Marx, delivered at Highgate Cemetery, London, 17 Mar 1883. Quoted in Karl Marx 1818-1883, for the Anniversary of his Death (1942), 27.
Life is the mode of action of proteins.
— Friedrich Engels
Engels’ definition of life, according to William Bragg, as given in Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science (2005), 343.
Men thought dialectically long before they knew what dialectics was, just as they spoke prose long before the term prose existed
— Friedrich Engels
In Friedrick Engels and Austin Lewis (trans., ed.), Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Dühring", (1907), 175.
One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?
— Friedrich Engels
Dialectics of Nature (1925), trans. Clemens Dutt (1940), 175.
The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and natural objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms—these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature which have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of investigation has also left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their motion, but in their repose; not as essentially changing, but fixed constants; not in their life, but in their death.
— Friedrich Engels
Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), First Publication (1878). Trans. Emile Burns and ed. C.P. Dutt (1935), 27-8.
The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind-images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidents and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end—this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is scarcely ever contradicted.
— Friedrich Engels
Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1886). C. P. Dutt (ed.) (1934), 54.
While natural science up to the end of the last century was predominantly a collecting science, a science of finished things, in our century it is essentially a classifying science, a science of processes, of the origin and development of these things and of the interconnection which binds these processes into one great whole.
— Friedrich Engels
Speaking of the 18th (last) and 19th (our) centuries, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1886, 1941).
Without analysis, no synthesis.
— Friedrich Engels
Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), First Publication (1878). Trans. Emile Burns and ed. C.P. Dutt (1935), 52.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
