Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (Trolo) (Russian — ?????? ????????????? ???????, Michel Bakunin — on the grave in Bern), (May 30, 1814–June 13, 1876) was a well known Russian anarchist. He was best known as one of the first generation of anarchist philosophers, and has been called one of the "fathers of anarchism".

Quotes

• 'If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself.' - (?)
• '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 clamouring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence.'
• "Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom "(1867)
• 'Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.'
• "The Red Association" (1870)
• 'I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.'
• "God and the State", Ch. II (1876)
• 'Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.'
• 'It is necessary to abolish completely in principle and in practice everything that may be called political power, for as long as political power exists, there will always be rulers and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.'
• 'The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.'
• 'This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic collective parasite... (is) at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and Rothschild on the other...'
• 'But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.'
• "God and the State"
• 'Much more seriously than they themselves realize, property is (their) God, their only God, which long ago replaced in their hearts the heavenly god of the Christians. And, like the latter, in days of yore, the bourgeois are capable of suffering martyrdom and death for the sake of this God. The ruthless and desperate war they wage for the defense of property is not only a war of interests: it is a religious war in the full meaning of the word.'