Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth.

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

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

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason.

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

Throw a theory into the fire; it only spoils life.

We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.

Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.

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

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

Every people, like every person, . . . has a right to be itself.

Theology created the fiction of Satan which represents the revolt if an infinite being against the existence of an absolute infinity, against God.

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

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.

We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.

Religion is collective insanity.

Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of decisively interfering in the life of someone else.

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

The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.

Theology is the science of the divine lie.

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.

[Jehovah is] certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.

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

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion