Top 97 Mikhail Bakunin Quotes
#2. If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
Mikhail Bakunin
#3. There is only one power and one dictatorship whose organisation is salutary and feasible: it is that collective, invisible dictatorship of those who are allied in the name of our principle.
Mikhail Bakunin
#4. Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
Mikhail Bakunin
#5. Theology created the fiction of Satan which represents the revolt if an infinite being against the existence of an absolute infinity, against God.
Mikhail Bakunin
#6. The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin
#7. From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.
Mikhail Bakunin
#8. If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
Mikhail Bakunin
#9. Every people, like every person, ... has a right to be itself.
Mikhail Bakunin
#10. Collective property and individual property, these two banners will be the standards under which, from now on, the great battles of the future will be fought.
Mikhail Bakunin
#12. If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.
Mikhail Bakunin
#13. We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.
Mikhail Bakunin
#14. From each according to his faculties; to each according to his needs
Mikhail Bakunin
#15. If God existed, only in one way could he serve the cause of human liberty-by ceasing to exist.
Mikhail Bakunin
#16. Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists.
Mikhail Bakunin
#18. [Jehovah is] certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.
Mikhail Bakunin
#19. If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable - and this is why we are the enemies of the State.
Mikhail Bakunin
#20. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
Mikhail Bakunin
#21. Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe.
Mikhail Bakunin
#23. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
Mikhail Bakunin
#24. Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.
Mikhail Bakunin
#25. We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
Mikhail Bakunin
#26. The privilege of ruling would be in the hands of the skilled and the learned, with a wide scope left for profitable crooked deals carried on by the Jews, who would be attracted by the enormous extension of the international speculations of the national banks.
Mikhail Bakunin
#27. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge.
Mikhail Bakunin
#28. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.
Mikhail Bakunin
#29. It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man, whether practically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart.
Mikhail Bakunin
#30. We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life ... We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligence
Mikhail Bakunin
#31. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
Mikhail Bakunin
#32. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist.
Mikhail Bakunin
#33. Anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved.
Mikhail Bakunin
#34. I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason.
Mikhail Bakunin
#35. Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.
Mikhail Bakunin
#37. Children do not constitute anyone's property:
they are neither the property of their parents nor even of society.
They belong only to their own future freedom.
Mikhail Bakunin
#38. Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.
Mikhail Bakunin
#39. Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.
Mikhail Bakunin
#40. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.
Mikhail Bakunin
#41. Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.
Mikhail Bakunin
#44. The organization of society is always and everywhere the unique cause of the crimes committed by individuals.
Mikhail Bakunin
#45. God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
Mikhail Bakunin
#46. The peoples' revolution ... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.
Mikhail Bakunin
#47. There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wine-shop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.
Mikhail Bakunin
#48. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn.
Mikhail Bakunin
#49. The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion.
Mikhail Bakunin
#50. Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.
Mikhail Bakunin
#51. Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker.
Mikhail Bakunin
#52. A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth.
Mikhail Bakunin
#53. All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.
Mikhail Bakunin
#54. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.
Mikhail Bakunin
#55. The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.
Mikhail Bakunin
#56. Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.
Mikhail Bakunin
#57. The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.
Mikhail Bakunin
#58. The individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense; first, he is guilty against human conscience, and, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges.
Mikhail Bakunin
#59. In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.
Mikhail Bakunin
#60. My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.
Mikhail Bakunin
#61. Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.
Mikhail Bakunin
#62. If there be a human being who is freer than I, then I shall necessarily become his slave. If I am freer than any other, then he will become my slave. Therefore equality is an absolutely necessary condition of freedom.
Mikhail Bakunin
#63. This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other.
Mikhail Bakunin
#64. Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds born
Mikhail Bakunin
#65. All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.
Mikhail Bakunin
#66. Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state-that is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation.
Mikhail Bakunin
#69. The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.
Mikhail Bakunin
#70. People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy
Mikhail Bakunin
#71. Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of decisively interfering in the life of someone else ...
Mikhail Bakunin
#72. Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.
Mikhail Bakunin
#73. In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.
Mikhail Bakunin
#74. To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion.
Mikhail Bakunin
#75. We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact ...
Mikhail Bakunin
#76. The passion for destruction is also a creative passion
Mikhail Bakunin
#77. The star of revolution will rise high above the streets of Moscow, from a sea of blood and fire, and turn into a lodestar to lead a liberated humanity
Mikhail Bakunin
#78. To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
Mikhail Bakunin
#79. No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.
Mikhail Bakunin
#80. When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick.
Mikhail Bakunin
#82. It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another.
Mikhail Bakunin
#83. Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.
Mikhail Bakunin
#84. A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.
Mikhail Bakunin
#85. By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.
Mikhail Bakunin
#86. I am sure that, on the one hand, the Rothschilds appreciate the merits of Marx, and that on the other hand, Marx feels an instinctive inclination and a great respect for the Rothschilds.
Mikhail Bakunin
#87. Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!
Mikhail Bakunin
#88. Look at Christ, my dear friend: His life was divine through and through, full of self-denial, and He did everything for mankind, finding His satisfaction and His delight in the dissolution of His material being.
Mikhail Bakunin
#89. Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.
Mikhail Bakunin
#90. We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.
Mikhail Bakunin
#91. Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.
Mikhail Bakunin
#92. If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.
Mikhail Bakunin
#93. Whoever says State necessarily says domination, and, consequently, slavery; a State without slavery, open or concealed, is inconceivable: that is why we are enemies of the State.
Mikhail Bakunin
#94. The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation - which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence.
Mikhail Bakunin
#95. Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.
Mikhail Bakunin
#96. I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
Mikhail Bakunin
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