Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

Dictators and oppressors should continue to fear me because I will be here for a long time.

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

God wants to set the oppressed free from being oppressed and the oppressors free from oppressing.

Conquerors never, never conquer a nation to bring freedom. They brought control.

Let tyrants shake their iron rod.

The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

The tyrant is only the slave turned inside out.

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

He who has the greatest power put into his hands will only become the more impatient of any restraint in the use of it.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others.

We are one people, and we cannot let the power of darkness or Power, Priviledge, and Control - destroy the Light.

Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom.

You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.

Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

Emancipation - what is meant by it? Simply that the slaves shall cease to be held as property and shall henceforth be held and treated as human beings. Simply, that we should take our feet from off their necks.

Authority is never without hate.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.