134 Quotes by Mikhail Bakunin

The real school for the people and for all grown men is life.

My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.

Bloody revolutions are often necessary, thanks to human stupidity; yet they are always an evil, a monstrous evil and a great disaster, not only with regard to the victims, but also for the sake of the purity and perfection of the purpose in whose name they take place.

The general idea is always an abstraction and, for that very reason, in some sort a negation of real life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust.

There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest States in the world – the United States of America or the Swiss Confederation, for instance – and see what an important part is played in all official discourses by divine Providence, that supreme sanction of all States.

Every command slaps liberty in the face.

If there is an undeniable fact, attested to a thousand times by experience, it is the corrupting effect produced by authority on those who manipulate it It is absolutely impossible for a man who wields power to remain a moral man...

I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.