Mikhail Bakunin Quotes
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and political philosopher and one of the most colorful figures of nineteenth-century European radicalism. After participation in the revolutions of 1848 and a long imprisonment in Russia, he escaped from Siberian exile and made his way back to Western Europe, where he engaged in long polemical conflicts with Marx within the First International. The quotes below are attributed to Mikhail Bakunin, organized by topic.
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Mikhail Bakunin on Freedom
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“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
The Reaction in Germany" (1842) | Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" [ 1 ] [ 2 ] -
Attributed to Mikhail Bakunin:
“I am free only when all human beings around me are equally free.”
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“Freedom without socialism is privilege; socialism without freedom is slavery.”
As we are convinced that the real attainment of liberty, of justice, and of peace in the world will be impossible so long as the immense majority of the populations are dispossessed of property, deprived of education and condemned to political and social nonbeing and a de facto if not a de jure slavery, through their state of misery as well as their need to labor without rest or leisure, in produc -
Attributed to Mikhail Bakunin:
“Liberty is not the daughter, but the mother, of order.”
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“What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the conscious product of their ignorance, want and clamoring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence.”
Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom (1867) -
“Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom (1867)”
What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the consci -
“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.”
The Red Association" (1870)
Mikhail Bakunin on God
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“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”
Amoureux et jaloux de la liberté humaine, et la considérant comme la condition absolue de tout ce que nous adorons et respectons dans l'humanité, je retourne la phrase de Voltaire, et je dis : Si Dieu existait réellement, il faudrait le faire disparaître.
Mikhail Bakunin on Knowledge
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“The Reaction in Germany" (1842)”
Everywhere, especially in France and England, social and religious societies are being formed which are wholly alien to the world of present-day politics, societies that derive their life from new sources quite unknown to us and that grow and diffuse themselves without fanfare. The people, the poor class, which without doubt constitutes the greatest part of humanity ; the class whose rights have a -
“The Reaction in Germany" (1842)”
We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth , to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance , and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life . The passion for dest -
“Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" [ 1 ] [ 2 ]”
We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth , to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance , and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life . The passion for dest -
“Freemasonry, in its development, in its growing power at first and later in its decadence, represented in a way the development, power, and moral and intellectual decadence of the bourgeoisie. Today, fallen to the sad position of a senile old intriguer, it is a useless, sometimes malevolent and always ridiculous nullity, whereas, before 1830 and especially before 1793, having gathered together at ”
Letter to the Comrades of the International Workingmen's Association of Locle and Cheau-de-Fonds", (1869) -
“I eagerly await tomorrow's mail to have news of Russia and Poland. For now, I have to content myself with a few vague rumors which float around. I have heard about new, bloody skirmishes in Poland between the people and troops; I was told that, even in Russia, there was a conspiracy against the czar and the whole royal family. I am equally passionate about the struggle between the North and the So”
Letter to Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen and Ogareff from San Francisco (3 October 1861); published in Correspondance de Michel Bakounine (1896) edited by Michel Dragmanov -
“Founding of the Workers' International”
In order to touch the heart and gain the confidence, the assent, the adhesion, and the co-operation of the illiterate legions of the proletariat — and the vast majority of proletarians unfortunately still belong in this category — it is necessary to begin to speak to those workers not of the general sufferings of the international proletariat as a whole but of their particular, daily, altogether p
Mikhail Bakunin on Politics
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“The Reaction in Germany" (1842) , Bakunin's first political writings, under the pseudonym "Jules Elysard"; it was not until 1860 that he began to publicly assert a stance of firm atheism and vigorous rejection of traditional religious institutions.”
FREEDOM , the realization of freedom: who can deny that this is what today heads the agenda of history ? … Revolutionary propaganda is in its deepest sense the negation of the existing conditions of the State, for, with respect to its innermost nature , it has no other program than the destruction of whatever order prevails at the time.... We must not only act politically , but in our politics act