Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

"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;"

If there is an undeniable fact, attested to a thousand times by experience, it is the corrupting effect produced by authority on those who manipulate it It is absolutely impossible for a man who wields power to remain a moral man....

It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and 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.

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion

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.

To achieve their fullest development, modern capitalist production and bank speculation require enormous centralized states, which alone are capable of subjecting the many millions of laborers to their exploitation. A federal organization, from below upward, of workers’ associations, groups, communes, districts, and, ultimately, regions and nations — the sole condition for real as opposed to fictitious freedom — is as contrary to their essence as any kind of economic autonomy is incompatible with them.

Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction - God, country, power of State, national honor, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare.

As one of our Swiss friends put it: “Now every German tailor living in Japan, China, or Moscow feels that he has the German navy and all of Germany’s power behind him. This proud consciousness sends him into an insane rapture: the German has finally lived to see the day when he can say with pride, relying on his own state, like an Englishman or an American, ‘I am a German.’ True, when the Englishman or American says ‘I am an Englishman,’ or ‘I am an American,’ he is saying ‘I am a free man.’ The German, however, is saying ‘I am a slave, but my emperor is stronger than all other princes, and the German soldier who is strangling me will strangle all of you.’ “
Will the German people content themselves with this feeling of pride for long? Who can say? They have thirsted so long for the grace of a unified state, a single cudgel, that has now descended upon them that one must assume they will want to enjoy it for quite some time yet. Every nation has its own tastes, and the German nation has a particular taste for a strong cudgel in the form of the state.

A Russia of the people is inconceivable without Polish freedom and independence.

There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest States in the world — the United States of America or the Swiss Confederation, for instance — and see what an important part is played in all official discourses by divine Providence, that supreme sanction of all States.

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.

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

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.

The glory and grandeur of a nation lie only in the
development of its humanity. Its strength and inner vitality are measured by the degree of its liberty.