"As a romantic rebel and an active force in history, Bakunin exerted a personal attraction that Marx could never rival. … His broad magnanimity and childlike enthusiasm, his burning passion for liberty and equality, his volcanic onslaughts against privilege and injustice — all gave him enormous appeal in the libertarian circles of his day. But Bakunin, as his critics never tired of pointing out, was not a systematic thinker. Nor did he ever claim to be. … He refused to recognize the existence of any preconceived or preordained laws of history. … He believed, on the contrary, that men shaped their own destinies, that their lives cannot be squeezed into a Procrustean bed of abstract social formulas. … And yet, however erratic and unmethodical, his writings abound in flashes of insight that illuminate some of the most important social questions of his time — and of ours."
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Paul Avrich, Introduction to God and the State (1970 Dover edition)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin
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Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (Russian: Михаил Александрович Бакунин) (30 May 1814 – 1 July 1876) was a Russian political philosopher, anarchist, and noted atheist.
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