11 Mikhail Bakunin Quotes on Politics

Mikhail Bakunin quotes on politics

3. Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

15. 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.

28. All that individuals can do is to clarify, propagate and work out ideas corresponding to the popular instinct, and, what is more, to contribute their incessant efforts to revolutionary organization of the natural power of the masses - but nothing else beyond that.

29. Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.

33. From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.

34. Freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice and Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.

35. 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.

36. I am neither a scientist, nor a philosopher nor even a professional writer. I have written very little in my life time, and have only ever done so in self-defence.

37. Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.

46. The advent of liberty is incompatible with the existence of States.

49. The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.