Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakuninwas a Russian revolutionary anarchist, and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism, and one of the principal founders of the social anarchist tradition. Bakunin's enormous prestige as an activist made him one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, and he gained substantial influence among radicals throughout Russia and Europe...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionRevolutionary
Date of Birth30 May 1814
CountryRussian Federation
Mikhail Bakunin quotes about
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.
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.
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.
Whoever says State necessarily says domination, and, consequently, slavery; a State without slavery, open or concealed, is inconceivable: that is why we are enemies of the State.
The urge to destroy is a creative urge.
A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.
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.
Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians - all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.
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.
Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.
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.
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.