I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
Mikhail BakuninRead
The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote criticizes the nature of the state as being rooted in force rather than persuasion or cooperation.
Mikhail Bakunin's quote explores the inherent qualities of the state, portraying it as an embodiment of force that operates through coercion rather than dialogue. The state is depicted as unfriendly and authoritative, with its actions marked by commands and compulsion, highlighting a fundamental critique of political power as a manifestation of violence rather than a facilitator of societal harmony.
Themes
StateForceCoercionCommandPolitics
In practice
Example use cases
During a debate on government policies, this quote can be used to highlight concerns about the use of force in legislation.
More from Mikhail Bakunin
All quotes →We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life. . . . We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligence
Mikhail BakuninRead
The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.
Mikhail BakuninRead
By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.
Mikhail BakuninRead
By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.
Mikhail BakuninRead
This 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 BakuninRead
Similar quotes
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
John Von NeumannRead
We so often tend to think our democracies are ruled by procedures and laws, but they are also governed by implicit rules and assumptions and one of them is the ability to feel shame - that you can be shamed.
Rutger BregmanRead
Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
Camille PagliaRead
Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression.
Steven BikoRead
The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.
H. P. LovecraftRead
To me spirituality needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people's aloneness.
RajneeshRead