Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

The masses of the working-people of Scotland have read history, and are no revolutionary levelers.

If the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?

Social paralysis is strong and stands firmly in the way of change on the ground level. As allies, we have to prepare ourselves to step into the fire when necessary, even - and especially - when said fire is merely a still-lit cigarette tossed carelessly onto the street.

Remember, social progress only happens when those in society's privileged classes choose to give up their status.

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

The French revolution was… to terminate the strife of kings among themselves, and to commence that between kings and people…. The princes of Europe, who had hitherto had no enemies but themselves, viewed it in the light of a common foe.

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendancy of the people.

Fear of the consequences of the masses’ indignation often induces the class holding parliamentary power to make concessions which the masses would not otherwise have obtained

Human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it … that alone determines revolutionary mental forms

Revolution is the duty of the worker and the peasant masses and not of just a few heroes, hence the necessity to organize these masses and draw them into the struggle.

A bourgeois revolution is always a revolution of a minority against the majority. The proletarian revolution which aims at being truly Communist, must be a revolution of the majority against the minority

[In the French Revolution] there is much to approve and much to condemn…. An essential change was necessary for the happiness and dignity of a great people, long in a state of degradation.

In the final account, the fate of our republic will depend upon whether the masses of the peasantry will go hand in hand with the working class

The first liberating revolutions never destroyed the large landholding powers that always constituted a reactionary force and upheld the principle of servitude on the land.

We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice.

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

Every progressive movement has been built on the anger, needs, and aspirations of the emerging major class.

In America, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the Occupy movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

I'm here to speak for those who say the American Dream isn't working for them, because I know it isn't. I'm here to say it's not your fault: the ruling class... has failed you.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.

There's a great feeling of powerlessness in America. When I express ideas to people, they say, 'That's terrific, but do you think it really counts?'

Our power creates collective production in the service of the people and the revolution, destroys exploiting production, transforms individualistic producers into producers integrated into the collectivity.