Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

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

Man is only truly free only among equally free men. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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 ~ 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

Representative democracy, however, harmonizes marvelously with the capitalist economic system. This new statist system, basing itself on the alleged sovereignty of the so-called will of the people, as supposedly expressed by their alleged representatives in mock popular assemblies, incorporates the two principal and necessary conditions for the progress of capitalism: state centralization, and the actual submission of the sovereign people to the intellectual governing minority, who, while claiming to represent the people, unfailingly exploits them. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every government, no matter who controls it, is an instrument of oppression. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

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! ~ 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 Bakunin

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. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

The idea of humanity becomes more and more of a power in the civilized world, and, owing to the expansion and increasing speed of means of communication, and also owing to the influence, still more material than moral, of civilization upon barbarous peoples, this idea of humanity begins to take hold even of the minds of uncivilized nations. This idea is the invisible power of our century, with which the present powers - the States - must reckon. They cannot submit to it of their own free will because such submission on their part would be equivalent to suicide, since the triumph of humanity can be realized only through the destruction of the States. But the States can no longer deny this idea nor openly rebel against it, for having now grown too strong, it may finally destroy them.

In the face of this fainful alternative there remains only one way out: and that is hypocrisy. The States pay their outward respects to this idea of humanity; they speak and apparently act only in the name of it, but they violate it every day. This, however, should not be held against the States. They cannot act otherwise, their position having become such that they can hold their own only by lying. Diplomacy has no other mission.

Therefore what do we see? Every time a State wants to declare war upon another State, it starts off by launching a manifesto addressed not only to its own subjects but to the whole world. In this manifesto it declares that right and justice are o ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

Every people, like every person, ... has a right to be itself. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

I am a convinced advocate of economic and social equality because I know that, without it, liberty, justice, human dignity, morality, and the well-being of individuals, as well as the prosperity of nations, will never amount to more than a pack of lies. But since I stand for liberty as the primary condition of mankind, I believe that equality must be established in the world by the spontaneous organization of labor and the collective ownership of property by freely organized producers' associations, and by the equally spontaneous federation of communes, to replace the domineering paternalistic State. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle - a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak - and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against the neighborhood States - it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice. ~ 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

For behind is our animality and before us our humanity; human light, the only thing that can warm and enlighten us, the only thing that can emancipate us, give us dignity, freedom, and happiness, and realize fraternity among us, is never at the beginning, but, relatively to the epoch in which we live, always at the end of history. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Human labor, in general, is still divided into two exclusive categories: the first - solely intellectual and managerial - includes the scientists, artists, engineers, inventors, accountants, educators, governmental officials, and their subordinate elites who enforce labor discipline The second group consists of the great mass of workers, people prevented from applying creative ideas or intelligence, who blindly and mechanically carry out the orders of the intellectual-managerial elite This economic and social division of labor has disastrous consequences for members of the privileged classes, the masses of the people, and for the prosperity, as well as the moral and intellectual development, of society as a whole. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

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

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

Thus, as I have already observed, materialism starts from animality to establish humanity; idealism starts from divinity to establish slavery and condemn the masses to an endless animality. Materialism denies free will and ends in the establishment of liberty; idealism, in the name of human dignity, proclaims free will, and on the ruins of every liberty founds authority. Materialism rejects the principle of authority, because it rightly considers it as the corollary of animality, and because, on the contrary, the triumph of humanity, the object and chief significance of history, can be realised only through liberty. In a word, you will always find the idealists in the very act of practical materialism, while you will see the materialists pursuing and realising the most grandly ideal aspirations and thoughts. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

A country bent on conquest is necessarily a country internally enslaved. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Bloody revolutions are often necessary, thanks to human stupidity; yet they are always an evil, a monstrous evil and a great disaster, not only with regard to the victims, but also for the sake of the purity and perfection of the purpose in whose name they take place. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

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

A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

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. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

The urge to destroy is a creative urge. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

He who is given power will inevitably become an oppressor and exploiter of society. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

I am a passionate seeker after Truth and a not less passionate enemy of the malignant fictions used
by the "Party of Order", the official representatives of all turpitudes, religious, metaphysical,
political, judicial, economic, and social, present and past, to brutalise and enslave the world; I am a
fanatical lover of Liberty; considering it as the only medium in which can develop intelligence,
dignity, and the happiness of man; ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

We have already observed that by excluding the immense majority of the human species from its midst, by keeping this majority outside the reciprocal engagements and duties of morality, of justice, and of right, the State denies humanity and, using that sonorous word patriotism, imposes injustice and cruelty as a supreme duty upon all its subjects. It restricts, it mutilates, it kills humanity in them, so that by ceasing to be men, they may be solely citizens - or rather, and more specifically, that through the historic connection and succession of facts, they may never rise above the citizen to the height of being man We have also seen that every state, under pain of destruction and fearing to be devoured by its neighbor states, must reach out toward omnipotence, and, having become powerful, must conquer. Who speaks of conquest speaks of peoples conquered, subjugated, reduced to slavery in whatever form or denomination. Slavery, therefore, is the necessary consequence of the very existence of the State. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anarchism is stateless socialism. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Theology is the science of the divine lie. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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. ~ 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

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

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

1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong? ~ Ken Follett

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. ~ 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

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

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

Religion is collective insanity. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Religion is a collective insanity. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

There will be a qualitative transformation, a new living, life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Every command slaps liberty in the face. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

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

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

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

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

My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity. ~ 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

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

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. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

He has studied all the live strings of the human heart in the same way as one studies the veins of a dead body. ~ Mikhail Lermontov

Just sit and open your eyes and open your heart. It's dance theater. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

Eh, Nikanor Ivanovich!' the unknown man exclaimed soulfully. 'What are official and unofficial persons? It all depends on your point of view on the subject. It's all fluctuating and relative, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I'm a unofficial person, and tomorrow, lo and behold, I'm an official one! And it happens the other way round -oh, how it does! - Chapter 9 ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Montreal, this wonderful town ... Pearl of Canada, Pearl of the world. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

Chess is no whit inferior to the violin, and we have a large number of professional violinists ~ Mikhail Botvinnik

Happiness is like good health: when you have it, you don't notice it. But as the years go by, oh, the memories, the memories of happiness past! ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

I don't try to dance better than anybody but myself. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

The procurator studied the new arrival with avid, and slightly fearful eyes. It was the kind of look one gives someone one has heard of and thought a lot about, and whom one is meeting for the first time. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Fischer is the greatest genius to descend from the chess heavens. ~ Mikhail Tal

The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin