Mikhail Bakunin
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.Collection: Atheist
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.Collection: Book
Man is only truly free only among equally free men.Collection: Men
Every people, like every person, . . . has a right to be itself.Collection: People
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.Collection: Sacrifice
Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.Collection: Men
We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.Collection: Liberty
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.Collection: Practice
The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.Collection: Rights
By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible.Collection: Men
There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wine-shop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.Collection: Wine
A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts with his deepest convictions. Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring shame upon himself or his cause. If we seek the liberation of the people by means of a lie, we will surely grow confused, go astray, and loose sight of our objective, and if we have any influence at all on the people we will lead them astray as well - in other words, we will be acting in the spirit of reaction and to its benefit.Collection: Strong
Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.Collection: Mean
I feel myself always the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands. Nationality is a historic, local fact which, like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance. Every people, like every person, is involuntarily that which it is and therefore has a right to be itself. Nationality is not a principle; it is a legitimate fact, just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or small, has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principal of freedom.Collection: Real
Anarchism is "stateless socialism."Collection: Anarchy
We must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.Collection: Principles
Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.Collection: Character
I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen... 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.Collection: Men
Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.Collection: Beautiful
Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state-that is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation.Collection: War
It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man, whether practically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart.Collection: Heart
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.Collection: Atheist
Does man's freedom consist in revolting against all laws? We say no, in so far as laws are natural, economic, and social laws, not authoritatively imposed but inherent in things, in relations, in situations, the natural development of which is expressed by those laws. We say YES if they are political and juridical laws, imposed upon men by men.Collection: Men
Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.Collection: Common Sense
The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom - voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Evil
The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion.Collection: Silly
Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.Collection: Political
Whoever says State necessarily says domination, and, consequently, slavery; a State without slavery, open or concealed, is inconceivable: that is why we are enemies of the State.Collection: Enemy
If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.Collection: God
God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.Collection: Men
Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds bornCollection: World
A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth.Collection: Powerful
The peoples' revolution... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.Collection: Liberty
The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!Collection: Creative
People’s State, is a yoke, on the one hand giving rise to despotism and on the other to slavery. They say that such a yoke – dictatorship is a transitional step towards achieving full freedom for the people: anarchism or freedom is the aim, while state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses of people, they have first to be enslaved!Collection: Mean
It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities.Collection: Men
Collective property and individual property, these two banners will be the standards under which, from now on, the great battles of the future will be fought.Collection: Wisdom
...one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits of their national characterCollection: Character
[Jehovah is] certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.Collection: Jealous
Theology is the science of the divine lie.Collection: Lying
That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of EuropeCollection: Country
We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life. . . . We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligenceCollection: Heart
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 humanityCollection: Stars
We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements. Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!Collection: Passion
Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians - all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.Collection: Kings
Throw a theory into the fire; it only spoils life.Collection: Fire
If God existed, only in one way could he serve the cause of human liberty-by ceasing to exist.Collection: Liberty
We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.Collection: Wish