Mikhail Bakunin Quotes
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Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!
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If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
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We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.
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When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."
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Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes... furious and... spiteful... when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself.
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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.
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Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.
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Children do not constitute anyone's property: they are neither the property of their parents nor even of society. They belong only to their own future freedom.
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God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
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In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.
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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.
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In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.
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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.
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I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
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If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.
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The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.
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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.
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Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.
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Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.
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As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
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The urge to destroy is a creative urge.
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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.
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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.
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Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.