Quotes by Friedrich Engels

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In place of the old local and national isolations is growing world exchange, the dependence of nations on one another, and what is true of material production is equally true of intellectual production. The intellectual creations of a nation become the common property of all. National narrowness and exclusivism become more and more impotent day by day, a universal literature is formed from the many national and local literatures.

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Man ... every active manifestation of his nature, every appropriation of him, every vital instinct of his, becomes a need, a necessity, which causes his selfishness to be transformed into an interest in other things and other people outside himself.

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Communists do not consider selfishness in opposition to devotion, nor devotion in opposition to selfishness... on the contrary, they reveal its material roots, with the disappearance of which the opposition disappears by itself.

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If mankind ever came to operate only with eternal truths, as the results of thought of sovereign validity and of the character of absolute truths, it would mean that it had reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world would be exhausted as a reality and as a possibility.