Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.

Should I abide by the rules until they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them?

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

I love revolutionaries who have the courage to stand up against the status quo. They're always misunderstood, but they're the ones who are standing up for human rights.

Don't accept the old order. Get rid of it.

And I have a message for the liberals and the defenders of the status quo: we're just getting started.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

How many of you are willing to go to jail for freedom?

Capitalism is so successful economically that it creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Look for me in the whirlwind.

… the most sacred right [revolution] to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

Questioning the status quo can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows you wish to butcher.

Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

If you want to challenge the system, don't go to bed with it.

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.

It's the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I'm always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands.

Today, whether it is a student who holds a sit-in to get the army recruiters off his campus, or the mother of a dead soldier who refuses to leave the front gate of the president's ranch, we continue to be saved by brave people who risk ridicule and rejection but end up turning huge tides of public opinion in the direction of righteousness. We owe them enormous debts of gratitude. It is not easy to stand up for what is right, especially when everyone else is afraid to leave the comfortable path of conformity.

The use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible.

In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.