Mikhail Bakunin

Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds…

— Mikhail Bakunin

A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts with his deepest convictions. Then,…

— Mikhail Bakunin

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual…

— Mikhail Bakunin

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its…

— Mikhail Bakunin

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

— Mikhail Bakunin

For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of the Church and State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave,…

— Mikhail Bakunin

But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity…

— Mikhail Bakunin

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of…

— Mikhail Bakunin

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

— Mikhail Bakunin

Look at Christ, my dear friend: His life was divine through and through, full of self-denial, and He did everything for mankind,…

— Mikhail Bakunin

What is freedom? What is slavery? Does man's freedom consist in revolting against all laws? We say No, in so far as…

— Mikhail Bakunin

“The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon…

— Mikhail Bakunin

Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.

— Mikhail Bakunin

It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man,…

— Mikhail Bakunin

We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each…

— Mikhail Bakunin

“There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest States in the world—the United States of America or…

— Mikhail Bakunin

The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.

— Mikhail Bakunin

But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his…

— Mikhail Bakunin

Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists.

— 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

If God existed, only in one way could he serve the cause of human liberty-by ceasing to exist.

— Mikhail Bakunin

The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as…

— Mikhail Bakunin

Theology created the fiction of Satan which represents the revolt if an infinite being against the existence of an absolute infinity, against…

— Mikhail Bakunin

I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge.

— Mikhail Bakunin

Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.

— Mikhail Bakunin