Mikhail Bakunin Quotes on Knowledge

Quotes

• “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

• “Letter to the Comrades of the International Workingmen's Association of Locle and Cheau-de-Fonds", (1869)”

  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 Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen and Ogareff from San Francisco (3 October 1861); published in Correspondance de Michel Bakounine (1896) edited by Michel Dragmanov”

  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

• “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)

• “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