Quotes from Mikhail Bakunin

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

I am sure that, on the one hand, the Rothschilds appreciate the merits of Marx, and that on the other hand, Marx feels an instinctive inclination and a great respect for the Rothschilds.

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

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

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

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.

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.

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.

No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.

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

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

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.

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