Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

There is only one power and one dictatorship whose organisation is salutary and feasible: it is that collective, invisible dictatorship of those who are allied in the name of our principle.

Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.

Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.

He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

The organization of society is always and everywhere the unique cause of the crimes committed by individuals.

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wine-shop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.

Does man's freedom consist in revolting against all laws? We say no, in so far as laws are natural, economic, and social laws, not authoritatively imposed but inherent in things, in relations, in situations, the natural development of which is expressed by those laws. We say YES if they are political and juridical laws, imposed upon men by men.

The privilege of ruling would be in the hands of the skilled and the learned, with a wide scope left for profitable crooked deals carried on by the Jews, who would be attracted by the enormous extension of the international speculations of the national banks.

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.

God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.

Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.

If God existed, only in one way could he serve the cause of human liberty-by ceasing to exist.

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.

Our first work must be the annihilation of everything as it now exists.

Collective property and individual property, these two banners will be the standards under which, from now on, the great battles of the future will be fought.

I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge.

Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes... furious and... spiteful... when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself.

To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion.

Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.

The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation - which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence.

...one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits of their national character

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.

For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of the Church and State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and falsify the mind of Europe. It had no competitors, because outside the Church there was neither thinkers nor educated persons. It alone taught, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught.

Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.

Religion is a collective insanity.

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.

Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

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

The peoples' revolution... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

The star of revolution will rise high above the streets of Moscow, from a sea of blood and fire, and turn into a lodestar to lead a liberated humanity

But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

Those mutually opposed manifestos are written with the same eloquence, they breathe the same virtuous indignation, and one is just as sincere as the other; that is to say both of them are equally brazen in their lies, and it is only fools who are deceived by them. Sensible persons, all those who have had some political experience, do not even take the trouble of reading such manifestos.

I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen... 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.

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.

The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom - voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity.

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

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.

The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!