Statism and Anarchy Quotes

“A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts with his deepest convictions. Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring shame upon himself or his cause. If we seek the liberation of the people by means of a lie, we will surely grow confused, go astray, and loose sight of our objective, and if we have any influence at all on the people we will lead them astray as well—in other words, we will be acting in the spirit of reaction and to its benefit.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“The modern state, in its essence and objectives, is necessarily a military state, and a military state necessarily becomes an aggressive state. If it does not conquer others it will itself be conquered, for the simple reason that wherever force exists, it absolutely must be displayed or put into action.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“If there is a state, then necessarily there is domination and consequently slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable—that is why we are enemies of the state.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“The only difference between revolutionary dictatorship and the state is in external appearances. Essentially, they both represent the same government of the majority by a minority in the name of the presumed stupidity of the one and the presumed intelligence of the other.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“That is because no state, not even the most republican and democratic, not even the pseudo-popular state contemplated by Marx, in essence represents anything but government of the masses from above downward, by an educated and thereby privileged minority which supposedly understands the real interests of the people better than the people themselves.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“Real patriotism is, of course, a highly honorable sentiment, but it is at the same time a narrow, exclusive, anti-humanistic, often simply bestial one.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“A Russia of the people is inconceivable without Polish freedom and independence.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“For the people, the church is a kind of celestial tavern, just as the tavern is a sort of celestial church on earth. In church and tavern alike they forget, at least momentarily, their hunger, their oppression, and their humiliation, and they try to dull the memory of their daily afflictions, in the one with mindless faith and in the other with wine. One form of intoxication is as good as the other.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“What predominates in Italy is that destitute proletariat to which Marx and Engels, and, following them, the whole school of German social democrats, refer with the utmost contempt. They do so completely in vain, because here, and here alone, not in the bourgeois stratum of workers, is to be found the mind as well as the might of the future social revolution.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“By nature mutually antagonistic and utterly irreconcilable, states can find no other grounds for joint action than the concerted enslavement of the masses who constitute the overall basis and purpose of their existence.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“Between a monarchy and the most democratic republic there is only one essential difference: in the former, the world of officialdom oppresses and robs the people for the greater profit of the privileged and propertied classes, as well as to line its own pockets, in the name of the monarch; in the latter, it oppresses and robs the people in exactly the same way, for the benefit of the same classes and the same pockets, but in the name of the people’s will.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“governmental despotism is never so fierce and so powerful as when it rests on the fictitious representation of a fictitious popular will.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“The most terrible poverty, however, even when it strikes a proletariat numbering in the many millions, is not a sufficient guarantee of revolution. Nature has given man an astonishing and, indeed, sometimes despairing, patience, and the devil knows what he will not endure when, along with poverty that condemns him to unheard-of privations and slow starvation, he is also endowed with obtuseness, emotional numbness, lack of any consciousness of his rights, and the kind of imperturbability and obedience that particularly characterize the east Indians and the Germans, among all nations. Such a fellow will never take heart; he will die, but he will not rebel.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“As one of our Swiss friends put it: “Now every German tailor living in Japan, China, or Moscow feels that he has the German navy and all of Germany’s power behind him. This proud consciousness sends him into an insane rapture: the German has finally lived to see the day when he can say with pride, relying on his own state, like an Englishman or an American, ‘I am a German.’ True, when the Englishman or American says ‘I am an Englishman,’ or ‘I am an American,’ he is saying ‘I am a free man.’ The German, however, is saying ‘I am a slave, but my emperor is stronger than all other princes, and the German soldier who is strangling me will strangle all of you.’ “
Will the German people content themselves with this feeling of pride for long? Who can say? They have thirsted so long for the grace of a unified state, a single cudgel, that has now descended upon them that one must assume they will want to enjoy it for quite some time yet. Every nation has its own tastes, and the German nation has a particular taste for a strong cudgel in the form of the state.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“Bismarck expressed in these words the very essence of the political history of nations, the whole secret of statecraft. The constant predominance and triumph of force—that is its real essence, while everything that political language calls right is merely the consecration of a fact created by force. Clearly, the masses thirsting for liberation cannot expect it from the theoretical triumph of abstract right; they must conquer freedom by force, and to do so they must organize their own spontaneous forces outside of the state and against it.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“If the proletariat is to be the ruling class, it may be asked, then whom will it rule?”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“Among the greatest geniuses to date, few have actually done anything for the people. A nation’s geniuses are highly aristocratic, and everything they have done up to now has served only to educate, strengthen, and enrich the exploiting minority. The poor masses, forsaken and abused by everyone, have had to break their own martyr’s path to freedom and light by means of an infinite number of obscure and fruitless efforts.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“The people should never be deceived, under any pretext or for any purpose. It would not only be criminal but detrimental to the revolutionary cause, for deception of any kind, by its very nature, is shortsighted, petty, narrow, always sewn with rotten threads, so that it inevitably tears and is exposed.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“Therefore, since we ourselves are deeply convinced atheists, enemies of any religious creed, and materialists, whenever we have occasion to speak with the people about religion we are obliged to give full expression to our lack of belief—I will go further and say our hostile attitude to religion. We should reply honestly to all their questions on this subject, and, when necessary, that is, when there is a prospect of success, we must even try to explain and prove to them the correctness of our views. But we should not ourselves seek opportunities for such discussions. We should not place the religious question in the forefront of our propaganda among the people. It is our profound conviction that to do so is synonymous with betrayal of the people’s cause.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“Cooperation in all its forms is undeniably a rational and just mode of future production. But for it to achieve its objective—liberation of all the workers and their full compensation and satisfaction—all forms of land and capital must become collective property. Until that occurs, cooperation in the majority of cases will be crushed by the almighty competition of big capital and big landholding. In the rare cases when some producers’ association, invariably more or less isolated, does succeed in withstanding and surviving this struggle, the result of its success will merely be the rise of a new privileged class of fortunate collectivists within the destitute mass of the proletariat. Thus, under the existing conditions of social economy, cooperation cannot liberate the worker masses. Nevertheless, it does offer the benefit, even now, of accustoming the workers to unite, organize, and independently manage their own affairs.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“In a republic a fictitious people, the “legal nation” supposedly represented by the state, smothers the real, live people. But it will scarcely be any easier on the people if the cudgel with which they are beaten is called the people’s cudgel.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“To achieve their fullest development, modern capitalist production and bank speculation require enormous centralized states, which alone are capable of subjecting the many millions of laborers to their exploitation. A federal organization, from below upward, of workers’ associations, groups, communes, districts, and, ultimately, regions and nations—the sole condition for real as opposed to fictitious freedom—is as contrary to their essence as any kind of economic autonomy is incompatible with them.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“[N]o dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and . . . it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it. Liberty can be created only by liberty, by an insurrection of all the people and the voluntary organization of the workers from below upward.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

“El que desea, no la Libertad, sino el Estado no debe jurar la revolucion.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy