Talk:Mikhail Bakunin

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Mikhail Bakunin. --Antiquary 19:34, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
 * 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.


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


 * Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of decisively interfering in the life of someone else....


 * Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.
 * On Beethoven's Ninth Symphony


 * Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.


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


 * 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.


 * 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.


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


 * If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.


 * If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself.


 * Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.


 * It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities.


 * It is the peculiarity of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the intellect and heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.


 * Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.


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


 * The free human society may arise at last, no longer organised ... from the top down... but rather starting from the free individual and the free association and autonomous commune, from the bottom up.


 * The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.


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


 * 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.


 * Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.


 * Women, different from man but not inferior to him, intelligent, hardworking and free as he is, should be declared his equal in all political and social rights... religious and civil marriage should be replaced by free marriage, and that the upkeep, education and training of all children should be a matter for everyone, a charge upon society .... children belonging neither to society nor to their parents but rather to their future liberty.


 * No one can want to destroy without having some idea, true or false, of the order of things that should, according to him or her, replace what presently exists.

Sheiknrattle (talk) 23:13, 6 May 2012 (UTC) Here is the relevant source for the creation/destruction quote, which should be put into the article, IMO. Written: October 1842, signed “Jules Elysard”; Source: Bakunin on Anarchy, translated and edited by Sam Dolgoff, 1971. link

"Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!"


 * I found a source for the quote "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." It can be found in "On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx", written in 1872. Mountnstream (talk) 13:42, 28 April 2015 (UTC)