Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Mikhail Bakunin
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.
I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge.
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.
A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.
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.
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.
The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.
Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.
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.
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.
If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.
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.
From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.
I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason.
Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.
Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.
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.
From each according to his faculties; to each according to his needs.
The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.
He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
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.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.
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.
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.
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.
Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.
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.
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.
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.
The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.
Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist.
The urge to destroy is a creative urge.
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.
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.
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.
Religion is a collective insanity.
Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.
Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
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.
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.
A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.
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.
The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.
We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Man is only truly free only among equally free men.
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.
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.
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."
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.
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.
Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!
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.
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