Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state-that is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation.
Mikhail BakuninThey maintain that only a dictatorship - their dictatorship, of course - can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: 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.
Mikhail BakuninWe are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
Mikhail BakuninThis contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other.
Mikhail BakuninIf you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
Mikhail BakuninPriests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians - all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.
Mikhail Bakunin