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A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

Mikhail Bakunin

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Mikhail Bakunin
Age: 62 †
Born: 1814
Born: May 30
Died: 1876
Died: July 1
Anarchist
Philosopher
Politician
Writer
Michael Bakunin
Michail Alexandrovich Bakunin
A. M. Bakunin
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin
Liberty
Absolute
Abolish
Humanity
Condition
Phrase
Human
Admire
Existed
Humans
Lovers
Reverse
Really
God
Jealous
Would
Necessary
Lover
Conditions
Phrases
Respect
Absolutes
Voltaire

More quotes by Mikhail Bakunin

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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.
Mikhail Bakunin
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The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion.
Mikhail Bakunin
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The individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense first, he is guilty against human conscience, and, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges.
Mikhail Bakunin
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The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.
Mikhail Bakunin
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Religion is collective insanity.
Mikhail Bakunin
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Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.
Mikhail Bakunin
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Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.
Mikhail Bakunin
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If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.
Mikhail Bakunin
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It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man, whether practically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart.
Mikhail Bakunin
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Religion is a collective insanity.
Mikhail Bakunin
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...one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits of their national character
Mikhail Bakunin
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The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!
Mikhail Bakunin
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That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe
Mikhail Bakunin
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Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie and the workers want no lying.
Mikhail Bakunin
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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.
Mikhail Bakunin
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We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.
Mikhail Bakunin
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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.
Mikhail Bakunin
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For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of the Church and State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and falsify the mind of Europe. It had no competitors, because outside the Church there was neither thinkers nor educated persons. It alone taught, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught.
Mikhail Bakunin
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If there be a human being who is freer than I, then I shall necessarily become his slave. If I am freer than any other, then he will become my slave. Therefore equality is an absolutely necessary condition of freedom.
Mikhail Bakunin
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I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason.
Mikhail Bakunin