47 Quotes By Mikhail Bakunin, The Founder Of Collective Anarchism
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
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.
The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.
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.
From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.
Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick.
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.
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.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
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.
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.
Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.
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 reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
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.
If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.
Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.
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.
Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.
Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.
