Daily Inspiration Quote by Friedrich Engels

Engels doesn’t lob this line as a moral complaint so much as a grenade aimed at the self-congratulatory story civilization tells about itself. “From the first day to this” is deliberately sweeping, a way of refusing the comforting idea that greed is a modern corruption rather than an original ingredient. And “sheer greed” is sharpened by that adjective: not ambition, not prudence, not the respectable “pursuit of self-interest,” but a naked appetite that polite society prefers to dress up as progress.

The subtext is a dare to stop taking civilization’s monuments at face value. For Engels, what gets celebrated as law, culture, religion, even “order” is often the administrative superstructure built on someone else’s extraction. “Driving spirit” is a pointed choice: it echoes the language of ideals, suggesting that the true animating force isn’t reason or virtue but material acquisition, with ideology playing ventriloquist. It also flattens the heroic arc of history into an engine-room story: who owns, who works, who pays.

Context matters. Engels is writing in the churn of 19th-century industrial capitalism, alongside Marx, watching factories transform daily life and wealth concentrate with brutal speed. The sentence carries polemical heat because it’s aimed at liberal and bourgeois narratives that treated markets and empire as civilizing missions. His claim isn’t that individuals never act nobly; it’s that the system’s organizing logic rewards accumulation, then builds a moral vocabulary to sanctify it. The sting is how recognizable that mechanism remains.