Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

It is in the nature of tyranny to deride the will of the people as the voice of the mob, and to denounce the cry for freedom as the roar of anarchy.

In early times, it was easier to control a million people than to kill a million. Today, it is infinitely easier to to kill a million people than to control a million.

My face on every coin engraved, the anarchists are all enslaved. My flag is forever waved, by the grateful people I have saved.

Freedom is contagious. That's why despots fear it so much.

Let tyrants shake their iron rod.

I have no desire to go in for tyranny or to play the part of King Charles. I hate tyranny in any field of human activity.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

I beheld absolutism in all its power; and I felt encouraged to enter into a struggle against Augustin I.

… so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, ... that is tyranny.

Extensive and organized power over large populations does not suffice to make a nation

… the Chinese Red Army is an armed body for carrying out the political tasks of the revolution…. the Red Army should certainly not confine itself to fighting; besides fighting to destroy the enemy's military strength, it should shoulder such important tasks as doing propaganda among the masses, organizing the masses, arming them, helping them to establish revolutionary political power and setting up Party organizations. The Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting but in order to conduct propaganda among the masses, organize them, arm them, and help them to establish revolutionary political power. Without these objectives, fighting loses its meaning and the Red Army loses the reason for its existence.

We of the South are emphatically surrounded by a dangerous class of beings--degraded, stupid savages--who, if they could but once entertain the idea that immediate and unconditional death would not be their portion, would re-enact the St. Domingo tragedy. But the consciousness, with all their stupidity, that a tenfold force, superior in discipline, if not in barbarity, would gather from the four corners of the United States and slaughter them, keeps them in subjection. But, to the non-slaveholding States, particularly, we are indebted for a permanent safeguard against insurrection. Without their assistance, the white population of the South would be too weak to quiet that insane desire for liberty which is ever ready to act itself out with every rational creature

The will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

One must not forget, however, that Russia had to free herself from the most frightful mis-government ever inflicted upon a long-suffering people.

The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom

The price of toppling Gadhafi will be steep. But Libyans will topple him, and in doing so, they will bring down with him the castles of fear our dictators thought they had fortified.

The Arab Spring, with all of its failings and failures, exposed the lie that if we are to live, then we must live as slaves. It was an attempt to undermine not only the orthodoxy of dictatorship but also an international political orthodoxy where every activity must be approved by the profit logic of the 'ledger.'

The director can be a dictator, but it's not wise to be. You have to choose the days to be a dictator and the days to deal with diplomacy and democracy. Every great leader should know that, even a dictator. Tyrants get overthrown.

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.

In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.

Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he's free , and he will fight to maintain his slavery .