Michail Bakunin citáty

„Svoboda všech je podstatná pro mou svobodu.“

—  Michail Bakunin

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

—  Mikhail Bakunin

As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937), E.H. Carr, p. 453

„This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

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

—  Mikhail Bakunin

"Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism" http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of-state.htm, presented by Bakunin as a Reasoned Proposal to the Central Committee of the League for Peace and Freedom, at the League's first congress held in Geneva (September 1867).
Variant translation: We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.
As quoted in The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (1953) edited by Grigoriĭ Petrovich Maksimov, p. 269

„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 private misfortunes. It is necessary to speak to them of their own trade and the conditions of their work in the specific locality where they live; of the harsh conditions and long hours of their daily work, of the small pay, the meanness of their employer, the high cost of living, and how impossible it is for them properly to support and bring up a family.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin

Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organisation of the International Brotherhood (1868)

„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, kniha God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

„The modern State is by its very nature a military State; and every military State must of necessity become a conquering, invasive State; to survive it must conquer or be conquered, for the simple reason that accumulated military power will suffocate if it does not find an outlet. Therefore the modern State must strive to be a huge and powerful State: this is the indispensable precondition for its survival.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha Statism and Anarchy

Statism and Anarchy (1873)

„Of escape there are but three methods — two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

„The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

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

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha Statism and Anarchy

"Statism and Anarchy" (1873)

„Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human society.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

„No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin

As quoted in Michael Bakunin (1937) by E.H. Carr, p. 175

„We must make a very precise distinction between the official and consequently dictatorial prerogatives of society organized as a state, and of the natural influence and action of the members of a non-official, non-artificial society.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin

Man, Society, and Freedom (1871)

„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

Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organisation of the International Brotherhood (1868)

„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.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin

"On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1872/karl-marx.htm (1872)

„Freedom is the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin

As quoted in Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, Daniel Guérin, New York: NY, Monthly Review Press (1970) p. 31

„All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed — that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind.“

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

„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

As quoted in The Old Order and the New (1890) by J. Morris Davidson

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

—  Mikhail Bakunin, kniha Statism and Anarchy

Statism and Anarchy (1873)