MIKHAIL BAKUNIN QUOTES
Russian anarchist (1814-1876)
It was impossible for the human mind to suspect that it was itself the sole creator of the divine world. It found the divine world before it; it found it as history, as tradition, as a sentiment, as a habit of thought; and it necessarily made it the object of its loftiest speculations. Thus was born metaphysics, and thus were developed and perfected the divine ideas, the basis of Spiritualism.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
The spontaneous action of the people themselves alone can create liberty.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
Statism and Anarchy
The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
Man, Society, and Freedom
In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx"
The sole mission of science is to light the road.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Oh, the air is sultry and pregnant with lightning.
And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the Kingdom of the Lord is at hand!
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"The Reaction in Germany"
God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible): "Behold, the man is become as one of the gods, to know good and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves." Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science—that is, by rebellion and by thought.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
In deifying human things the idealists always end in the triumph of a brutal materialism. And this for a very simple reason: the divine evaporates and rises to its own country, heaven, while the brutal alone remains actually on earth.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
The inconceivable had become the usual, the impossible possible, and the possible and the usual unthinkable.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
The Confession of Mikhail Bakunin
The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
Man, Society and Freedom
We recognize, then, the absolute authority of science, because the sole object of science is the mental reproduction, as well-considered and systematic as possible, of the natural laws inherent in the material, intellectual, and moral life of both the physical and the social worlds, these two worlds constituting, in fact, but one and the same natural world. Outside of this only legitimate authority, legitimate because rational and in harmony with human liberty, we declare all other authorities false, arbitrary and fatal.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state."
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
Rousseau's Theory of the State
In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
If God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty -- by ceasing to exist.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Let us, then, never look back, let us look ever forward; for forward is our sunlight, forward our salvation.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Well, religion is a collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional folly, and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity. As collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public and private existence of the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it has become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought. Every man is enveloped in it from his birth; he sucks it in with his mother’s milk, absorbs it with all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so exclusively fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated by it in all his being, that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make unheard-of efforts to deliver himself from it, and even then never completely succeeds.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at least make a semblance of believing. This class, comprising all the tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity; priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, capitalists, tax-leeches, contractors and landlords, lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats, all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, the people must have a religion. That is the safety-valve.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State