Best 112 quotes of Mikhail Bakunin on MyQuotes

Mikhail Bakunin

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    Anarchism is "stateless socialism.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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 upon men by men.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    [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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

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

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    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.

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    Mikhail Bakunin

    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.