Mikhail Bakunin's Quotes

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

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

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

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.

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.

A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

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