Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

If you look at slavery across all human history, and you sort of strip away the packaging, whether it's racialized or religious-based, and you look at the actual core of the slavery, it's one person completely controlling another one.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

They would make fine servants .... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

Would you rather lead an army of slaves?

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

It is one thing to own a woman, and it is another to have her within the bonds of an excellent mastery.

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

Back in those days intimidation was the greatest tool the drill instructor had. Without that tool, he would not have had control.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

To depend upon the Will of a Man is Slavery.

The power which establishes a state is violence; the power which maintains it is violence; the power which eventually overthrows it is violence.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave.