Quotes from Mikhail Bakunin

The inconceivable had become the usual, the impossible possible, and the possible and the usual unthinkable.

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.

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

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

The sole mission of science is to light the road.

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.

In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.

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."

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.

Let us, then, never look back, let us look ever forward; for forward is our sunlight, forward our salvation.

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

From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish, sincerely and energetically.

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

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.

From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.

The urge for destruction is also a creative urge.

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.

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

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.

I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.

Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn.

Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.