Mikhail Bakunin Quotes

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.

No nation which has kept the commandments of God has ever perished, but I say to you that once freedom is lost, only blood - human blood - will win it back.

He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.

In the Bible, God offered the Pharaoh freedom if he would just let the oppressed people free to go to the land of milk and honey. But the Pharaoh disobeyed, and he was destroyed.

No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

Liberty's chief foe is theology.

To despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful; it is rebellion against God's will.

God keeps man free, never forcing his will. Contrary to it, Satan seeks to possess the human will, to enslave it .… traditions, however, which do not know of the principle of the freedom of Christ, often seek to subject the human consciousness to the external will of a ruler or a collective

The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

They (tyrants) should be attacked, not as ordinary enemies, but as assassins and rebellious brigands. Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they may be, are slaves in revolt against the sovereign of the land, who is the human race, and against the legislator of the Universe, who is Nature.

The abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God's creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching.

One must not forget, however, that Russia had to free herself from the most frightful mis-government ever inflicted upon a long-suffering people.

Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

Every revolution, bloody or not, has two phases. The first phase is defined by the struggle for freedom, the second by the struggle for power and revenge on the votaries of the ancien regime.

Everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.

An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

Anytime you turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.

God himself has no right to be a tyrant.