Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Mental or intellectual subjugation inevitably leads to physical and societal bondage.
In plain terms
If your mind is enslaved, your society will soon follow.
What can you take from it?
Mental freedom must precede political freedom.

Where it applies

  • education reform
  • cultural critique
  • advocacy

Putting it to work

  • promote critical thinking
  • challenge dogma
  • support intellectual liberty

Questions to consider

  • How does thought control society?
  • Can society be free if minds are not?

Another view

Physical slavery can exist without prior intellectual enslavement.

More from Mikhail Bakunin

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

    Permalink to quote #39
  2. 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…

    Permalink to quote #41
  3. If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.

    Permalink to quote #38

Related quotes

  1. Passion, intellect, moral activity - these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be sati…

    Florence NightingaleFlorence Nightingale quote #28
  2. An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls - even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls - without discovering sooner or later that the…

    Pearl BuckPearl Buck quote #1
  3. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to me…

    John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill quote #8