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

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
Within
Vested
Power
Ardent
Years
Revolutionary
Would
Absolutes
Absolute
Worse
Took
Year
Tsar

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Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.
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[Jehovah is] certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.
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Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!
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Throw a theory into the fire it only spoils life.
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We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.
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A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth.
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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.
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We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.
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Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.
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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.
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He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
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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.
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Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.
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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.
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We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
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Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state-that is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation.
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I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason.
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A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.
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I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen... I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
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When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick.
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