Mikhail Bakunin quotes

Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and philosopher, recognized as one of the most influential figures in the development of anarchism. His writings passionately advocated for the abolition of the state and all forms of hierarchical authority. He inspired numerous movements worldwide and became a leading voice for radical social change. Here are 101 of his quotes:

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.

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.

Mikhail Bakunin

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

Mikhail Bakunin

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.

Mikhail Bakunin

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.

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.

Mikhail Bakunin

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

Mikhail Bakunin

We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.

Mikhail Bakunin

The peoples' revolution .... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

Mikhail Bakunin

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

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.

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.

Mikhail Bakunin

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

Mikhail Bakunin

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."

Mikhail Bakunin

There is but one way to bring about the triumph of liberty, of justice, and of peace in Europe's international relations, to make civil war impossible between the different peoples who make up the European family; and that is the formation of the United States of Europe.

Mikhail Bakunin

All exercise of authority perverts, and submission to authority humiliates.

Mikhail Bakunin

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interest of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

Mikhail Bakunin

The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity. Otherwise it never could have spread.

Mikhail Bakunin

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.

Mikhail Bakunin

Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked.

Mikhail Bakunin

Not official revolutionary commissars in any sort of sashes, but rather revolutionary propagandists are to be dispatched into all the provinces and communes and particularly among the peasants who cannot be revolutionised by principles, nor by the decrees of any dictatorship, but only by the act of revolution itself, that is to say, by the consequences that will inevitably ensure in every commune from complete cessation of the legal and official existence of the state.

Mikhail Bakunin

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

Mikhail Bakunin