Quotes from bakunin mikhail vi

Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in history: (1) human animality; (2) thought; and (3) rebellion. To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty.

We must not only act politically, but in our politics act religiously, religiously in the sense of freedom, of which the one true expression is justice and love.

In behalf of human liberty, dignity, and prosperity, we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth.... It is now the freethinkers' turn to pillage heaven by their audacious impiety and scientific analysis.

The human mind, then, one might have supposed, was at last about to deliver itself from all the divine obsessions. Not at all. The divine falsehood upon which humanity had been feeding for eighteen centuries (speaking of Christianity only) was once more to show itself more powerful than human truth.

The instinctive passion of the masses for economic equality is so great that if they could hope to receive it from the hands of despotism, they would indubitably and without much reflection do as they have often done before, and deliver themselves to despotism.

Anarchism is "stateless socialism."

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

The savings of workers are fairy tales invented by bourgeois economists to lull their weak sentiment of justice.

Every development, I have said, implies the negation of its point of departure.