Mikhail Bakunin Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“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 -
“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 -
“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
“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 -
-
“The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.”
-- Mikhail BakuninSource : "Man, Society, and Freedom" by Mikhail Bakunin (1871), as quoted in Mikhail Bakunin "Bakunin on Anarchism" edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff, 1971.
-
“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick.”
-- Mikhail BakuninSource : "Statism and Anarchy". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1873.
-
“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 BakuninSource : "God and the State". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1882.
-
“Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
-
“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 BakuninSource : "God and the State" (1871)
-
“They maintain that only a dictatorship - their dictatorship, of course - can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
“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 -
“As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.”
-- Mikhail BakuninSource : Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1980). “Bakunin on anarchism”
-
-
“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.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
“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 BakuninSource : "God and the State". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1883.
-
“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 -
“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 -
-
“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 -
“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 -
“A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts with his deepest convictions. Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring shame upon himself or his cause. If we seek the liberation of the people by means of a lie, we will surely grow confused, go astray, and loose sight of our objective, and if we have any influence at all on the people we will lead them astray as well—in other words, we will be acting in the spirit of reaction and to its benefit.”
-- Mikhail BakuninSource : "God and the State". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1883.
-
“A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
-
“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 -
“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
“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 BakuninSource : "Statism and Anarchy". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1873.
-
“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 -
-
“The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
“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 -
“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 -
“The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom - voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
-
“Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.”
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
“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
You may also like:
-
Alexander Herzen
Writer -
Emma Goldman
Writer -
Errico Malatesta
Writer -
Friedrich Engels
Author -
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Novelist -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philosopher -
Immanuel Kant
Philosopher -
Ivan Turgenev
Novelist -
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Philosopher -
Karl Marx
Philosopher -
Leo Tolstoy
Writer -
Ludwig Feuerbach
Philosopher -
Max Stirner
Philosopher -
Noam Chomsky
Linguist -
Peter Kropotkin
Zoologist -
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Author -
Robert Owen
Social activist -
Vissarion Belinsky
Literary critic
