Top 15 Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

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

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 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.

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

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick.

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy. — Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy

The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.

The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!

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.

Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.

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

By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.

Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.