Daily Inspiration Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Apocalypse, yes - but keep your hands off Beethoven. Bakunin, the arch-revolutionary who wanted to tear down states, churches, and inherited authority, draws a line of almost comic reverence around the Ninth Symphony. The intent isn’t to soften his politics; it’s to sharpen them. If even a man committed to permanent upheaval can name something worth preserving, then his destruction isn’t nihilism for its own sake. It’s selective: burn the institutions, spare the human achievement.

The subtext is a critique of what usually claims immortality. Empires insist they are eternal; religions promise the same; nations wrap themselves in destiny. Bakunin flips the hierarchy. Political orders are perishable, history’s disposable packaging, while art - specifically a work that stages conflict, struggle, and a hard-won utopian release - outlasts the world that produced it. The Ninth matters as more than “beautiful music.” It’s a mass, public, almost democratic monument: voices rising together, a sonic model of collective liberation. For a revolutionary, that’s not decoration; it’s prophecy.

Contextually, this is a 19th-century radical speaking in a Europe convulsed by failed revolutions, repression, and the churn of modernity. Beethoven had already been canonized as the genius of freedom, the composer who made personal defiance sound like a public event. Bakunin borrows that cultural capital to make a pointed wager: regimes will collapse, even civilization might, but the highest expressions of human solidarity and daring remain the real sacred objects. It’s not anti-politics. It’s a reminder that politics is supposed to serve something like this.