[A]s long as we have a master in heaven we shall be slaves on earth. Our reason and will-power will be equally nullified. As long as we believe that we owe absolute obedience—and no other kind is possible in the sight of God—we are bound to submit, passively and uncritically, to the divine authority of his spokesmen and his elect: Messiahs, prophets, divinely inspired legislators, emperors, kings and all their dignitaries and ministers, the representatives and devoted servants of the two great institutions which inflict themselves upon ourselves as God’s instruments for the guidance of men. Those institutions are Church and State: all temporal or human authority derives directly from spiritual or divine authority. But authority is denial of liberty, therefore God, or rather the fiction of God, is the sanction and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and men’s liberty will not be complete until it has utterly eradicated the pernicious fiction of a heavenly master. (Michael Bakunin)