Mikhail Bakunin Quotes:

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.

Topics: Liberty, Doe, Want, Individual Liberty, Individual Morality

From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.

Topics: Equality, Men, Views

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Topics: Lying, Equality, Hype, Economic Equality, Political Freedom

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.

Topics: Children, Parent, Society

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

source: - "Man, Society, and Freedom" by Mikhail Bakunin (1871), as quoted in Mikhail Bakunin "Bakunin on Anarchism" edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff, 1971.

Topics: Essentials

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick.

source: - "Statism and Anarchy". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1873.

Topics: School, People, Sticks, Anarchism

A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

source: - "God and the State". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1882.

Topics: Boss, Heaven, Earth, Boss Day

Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!

Topics: Nihilism, Way, Middle, Middle Way, Destroyers

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.

source: - "God and the State" (1871)

Topics: Men, Diversity, Culture, Anarchism

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.

Topics: Self, Organization, People, Toiling

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.

Topics: Government, Liberty, Minorities, Fleece

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

source: - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1980). “Bakunin on anarchism”

Topics: God, Long, Heaven

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.

Topics: People, Religion, Atheism

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.

source: - "God and the State". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1883.

Topics: Men, Religion, Atheism, Demigods

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.

Topics: Book, Humanity, World

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.

Topics: Self, Looks, Denial

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

Topics: Years, Would Be, Revolutionary, Absolute Power, Ardent

Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.

Topics: Men, Want, Fellow Man

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.

source: - "God and the State". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1883.

Topics: Strong, Confused, Lying

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.

Topics: God, Jealous, Humanity, Abolish, Theist

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.

Topics: Long, Heaven, Atheism

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.

Topics: Atheist, Atheism, Nihilism

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.

source: - "Statism and Anarchy". Book by Mikhail Bakunin, 1873.

Topics: Class, Enemy, Slavery

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.

Topics: Practice, Ideas, Justice, Abdication, Enslavement

The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!

Topics: Creative, Destruction

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.

Topics: Taken, Men, Humanity, Steps Forward, Achieving The Impossible

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.

Topics: Beautiful, Real, Humanity, Monstrous

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.

Topics: Real, Views, Broken, Compulsory

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

Topics: Effort, Generations, Individual, Cumulative

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.

Topics: Atheism, Boots, Matter

If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

Topics: Slavery, States, Domination

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.

source: - "On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx" by Mikhail Bakunin (1872), as quoted in Mikhail Bakunin "Bakunin on Anarchism" edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff, www.marxists.org. 1971.

Topics: Crush, Animal, Feet

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.

Topics: God, Men, Circles

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.

Topics: Deeds, Principles, Propaganda

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.

Topics: Heart, Men, Mind, Privileged

Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes... furious and... spiteful... when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself.

Topics: Christian, Religious, Believe, Rancor, Omniscience

...one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits of their national character

Topics: Character, Passion, People, Leeches, Divergence

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.

Topics: Lying, Two, Humanity

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements.Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

Topics: Heart, Passion, Creative, Intellectual Arrogance, Circumspection

Anarchism is "stateless socialism.

source: - "Stateless Socialism: Anarchism". "The Political Philosophy of Bakunin" by G.P. Maximoff, dwardmac.pitzer.edu. 1953.

Topics: Anarchy, Socialism, Anarchism

A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.

Topics: Strength, Strong, Speak

Throw a theory into the fire; it only spoils life.

Topics: Fire, Burning, Theory

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

Topics: Individuality, Liberty, Vices, Individual Liberty

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.

Topics: Hands, Appreciate, Merit, Great Respect

Theology created the fiction of Satan which represents the revolt if an infinite being against the existence of an absolute infinity, against God.

Topics: Devil, Fiction, Infinity

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.

Topics: Liberty, Revolution, Principles

The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.

Topics: Rights, Political, Important, Political Rights

The organization of society is always and everywhere the unique cause of the crimes committed by individuals.

Topics: Unique, Organization, Causes

That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe

Topics: Country, War, Lying, European Countries

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.

Topics: Inspiration, Europe, Civilization

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

Topics: Powerful, Littles, Weakness

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.

Topics: Liberty, Wish, Needs

Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.

Topics: Symphony, Musical, World

I simply love white people. We're the awesomest. Especially Slavic people who I am especially fond of. And Capitalism is way too Jewish for me, sorry.

Topics: Sorry, White, Who I Am

A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth.

Topics: Powerful, Divine, Humans

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.

source: - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1980). “Bakunin on anarchism”

Topics: Honesty, Names, Age, Serfs

I myself am human and free only to the extent that I acknowledge the humanity and liberty of all my fellows... I am properly free when all the men and women about me are equally free. Far from being a limitation or a denial of my liberty, the liberty of another is its necessary condition and confirmation.

Topics: Men, Humanity, Liberty

I feel myself always the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands. Nationality is a historic, local fact which, like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance. Every people, like every person, is involuntarily that which it is and therefore has a right to be itself. Nationality is not a principle; it is a legitimate fact, just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or small, has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principal of freedom.

Topics: Real, Acceptance, People, Fatherland

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.

Topics: Men, Intellectual, Atheism

Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians - all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.

Topics: Kings, Soldier, Atheism, Jailer, Hangman

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.

Topics: Silly, Essence, Liberty

Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of decisively interfering in the life of someone else...

Topics: Doe, Interfere

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.

Topics: Two, Battle, Politics, Great Battle

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.

Topics: Passion, Ideas, Despair, Revolutionary Ideas, Utter Despair

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.

Topics: Men, Impossible, Strive

Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.

Topics: Tyrants, Idealism, Despots, Idealism And Realism

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.

Topics: Men, Law, Liberty

Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.

Topics: Common Sense, Sound, Christianity, Negation

I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge.

Topics: Development, Inability, Details, Human Knowledge

[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.

Topics: Jealous, Religion, Liberty, Hostile

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason.

Topics: Men, Special, Bows, Special Man

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.

Topics: Hands, Would Be, Privilege

It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities.

Topics: Men, Rights, Perfect, Social Environment, Iniquity

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.

Topics: Justice, Social Justice, Slave

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.

Topics: Evil, Morality, Human Nature

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.

Topics: Strong, Mean, People, Centralization

But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his ***** 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.

source: - Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (2009). “God and the State”, p.10, Cosimo, Inc.

Topics: Atheist, Ignorance, Men, Freethinker

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

Topics: Liberty, Slavery, Privilege

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.

Topics: Honesty, Special, May

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.

Topics: War, Passion, Views

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.

Topics: Wine, Two, Church, Social Revolution, Three Ways

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

Topics: Heart, Atmosphere, Nihilism, Day Life, Milieu

He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

Topics: Humanity, Liberty, Desire

Those mutually opposed manifestos are written with the same eloquence, they breathe the same virtuous indignation, and one is just as sincere as the other; that is to say both of them are equally brazen in their lies, and it is only fools who are deceived by them. Sensible persons, all those who have had some political experience, do not even take the trouble of reading such manifestos.

Topics: Lying, Reading, Political, Brazen

Man is only truly free only among equally free men.

Topics: Men, Free Man

Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.

Topics: Revolution, Plans

We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact....

Topics: Atheist, Facts, Glory

Religion is a collective insanity.

source: - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin “The Selected Works of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin”, Library of Alexandria

Topics: Insanity, Collectives

Theology is the science of the divine lie.

Topics: Lying, Divine, Theology

For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of the Church and State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and falsify the mind of Europe. It had no competitors, because outside the Church there was neither thinkers nor educated persons. It alone taught, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught.

Topics: Europe, Omnipotence, Competition, Educated Person

The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.

Topics: Heart, Men, Intellect

What is freedom? What is slavery? Does man's freedom consist in revolting against all laws? We say No, in so far as laws are natural, economic, and social laws, not authoritatively imposed but inherent in things, in relations, in situations, the natural development of which is expressed by those laws. We say Yes if they are political and juridical laws, imposed by men upon men: whether violently by the right of force; whether by deceit and hypocrisy - in the name of religion or any doctrine whatever; or finally, by dint of the fiction, the democratic falsehood called universal suffrage.

Topics: Men, Law, Names, Universal Suffrage

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

Topics: Stars, Blood, Sea, Liberated

Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists.

Topics: Firsts, Annihilation

Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds born

Topics: Way, Revolution, World

The urge to destroy is a creative urge.

Topics: Creative, Urges

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.

source: - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Marshall Shatz (1990). “Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy”, p.46, Cambridge University Press

Topics: Character, Thinking, Rights

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.

source: - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin “The Selected Works of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin”, Library of Alexandria

Topics: Sacrifice, Blood, Ideas

Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.

Topics: Mean, Responsibility, Men

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.

Topics: Enemy, Slavery, States

I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen... 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.

source: - "Man, Society, and Freedom" by Mikhail Bakunin, translated by Sam Dolgoff in "Bakunin on Anarchy", 1971.

Topics: Men, Humanity, Liberty

Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.

Topics: Political, Intellectual, Slavery

People’s State, is a yoke, on the one hand giving rise to despotism and on the other to slavery. They say that such a yoke – dictatorship is a transitional step towards achieving full freedom for the people: anarchism or freedom is the aim, while state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses of people, they have first to be enslaved!

Topics: Mean, Order, Firsts

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.

source: - "Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organization of the International Brethren" by Mikhail Bakunin (1868), as quoted in "No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism" edited by Daniel Guerin, 1965.

Topics: Liberty, Principles, Revolution, Periphery

If God existed, only in one way could he serve the cause of human liberty-by ceasing to exist.

Topics: Liberty, Way, Causes

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.

source: - Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin “The Selected Works of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin”, Library of Alexandria

Topics: Two, Firsts, Privilege

Religion is collective insanity.

Topics: Insanity, Collectives

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.

Topics: Names, Principles, Invisible