Mikhail Bakunin Short Quotes

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The urge for destruction is also a creative urge.

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

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

Mikhail Bakunin
Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.
Of beethoven's Ninth Symphony

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

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

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

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

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

Mikhail Bakunin
In our church - if I may be permitted to use for a moment an expression which I so detest - -we have a chief, an invisible Christ, science.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human society.

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
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