Max Stirner famous quotes

The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime
-- Max Stirner

#Law #Politics #Violence

Religion itself is without genius. There is no religious genius and no one would be permitted to distinguish between the talented and the untalented in religion.
-- Max Stirner

#Religious #Would Be #Genius

Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?
-- Max Stirner

#Stupid #Ideas #Space

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.
-- Max Stirner

#Freedom #Fall #Men

Then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be somewhat expressed as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.
-- Max Stirner

#Self #Each Day #May

Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.
-- Max Stirner

#Cheer #Air #Order

No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commmonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish.
-- Max Stirner

#Selfish #School #Merit

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!
-- Max Stirner

#Philosophy #Hate #Perfection

In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud—crime, doesn't it rumble in the distant thunder, and don't you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?
-- Max Stirner

#Sky #May #Proud

Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right."
-- Max Stirner

#Leadership #Purpose #Might

Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns - they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.
-- Max Stirner

#Libertarian #Causes #Looks

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
-- Max Stirner

#Fighting #Men #Missing

We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
-- Max Stirner

The web of hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies.
-- Max Stirner

#Stupid #Swings #Self

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is -- unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Unique #Etc

There are intellectual vagabonds, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquility to thousands, they overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their imprudent criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds.
-- Max Stirner

#Running #Father #Thinking

If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves!
-- Max Stirner

#Care #Take Care

Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.
-- Max Stirner

#Taken #Liberty #Granted

The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.
-- Max Stirner

#Liberty #Limits #Individual

We don't call it sin today, we call it self-expression.
-- Max Stirner

#Expression #Self #Cynical

The State practices "violence," the individual must not do so. The state's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime".
-- Max Stirner

#War #Law #Practice

Liberty of the people is not my liberty!
-- Max Stirner

#People #Liberty #Democracy

A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Race #Slave

I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. [...] He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair.
-- Max Stirner

#Mean #Tears #Done

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?
-- Max Stirner

#Why Not #Ends #Middle

The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.
-- Max Stirner

#Religious #Thinking #Mind

The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.
-- Max Stirner

#Song #School #Heart

Feuerbach ... recognizes ... "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, for Man's sake, and so-for ***** homini Deus-for God's sake?
-- Max Stirner

#Religious #Men #Inward

I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?
-- Max Stirner

#Justice #Humanity #Desire

The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling.
-- Max Stirner

#Lying #College #Men

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
-- Max Stirner

#Ties #Sacred

Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Species

It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.
-- Max Stirner

#Religious #Attitude #Humble

Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom good maxims have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in.
-- Max Stirner

#Children #Made #Breeding

Nothing is more to me than myself.
-- Max Stirner

#Egotism

Before what is sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my conscience.
-- Max Stirner

#Attitude #Humble #People

The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself.
-- Max Stirner

#People #Soul #Atheism

Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man.
-- Max Stirner

#Religious #Real #Men

People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.
-- Max Stirner

#Names #People #Body

One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.
-- Max Stirner

#Taken #Weakness #Worthy

What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
-- Max Stirner

#Party #What Matters #Flags

The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the immoral man. He who is not moral is immoral! and accordingly reprobate, despicable, etc. Therefore, the moral man can never comprehend the egoist.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Enemy #Etc

When every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied.... His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.
-- Max Stirner

#Taken #Cutting #Men

Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
-- Max Stirner

#Running #Personality #Together

He who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Sacred #Infatuation

Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.
-- Max Stirner

#Property

What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing.
-- Max Stirner

#Long

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self. [] If man puts his honor first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, this in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes a strange impenetrable object a barrier and a hindrance to his self-knowledge.
-- Max Stirner

#Fall #Ignorance #Men

The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him to the general purpose Through its censorship, its supervision, and its police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands it. The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value and communicate them to other men unless they are its own Otherwise it shuts me up.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Self #Police

Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority.
-- Max Stirner

#Doe #Needs #Authority

Crimes spring from fixed ideas.
-- Max Stirner

#Spring #Ideas #Crime

Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
-- Max Stirner

#States #Despotism

If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself.
-- Max Stirner

#Children #Doe #Ennui

From the moment when he catches sight of the light of the world, a man seeks to find out himself and get hold of himself out of its confusion, in which he, with everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Light #Sight

Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Belief #Spirit

The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the master; the securing of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom.
-- Max Stirner

#Men #Political #Dominion

When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks "if I only have my dear life," he does not apply his full strength to using, i. e., enjoying, life.
-- Max Stirner

#Thinking #Enjoy Life #Doe

Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction.
-- Max Stirner

#Law #Grace #Fiction

Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.
-- Max Stirner

#Education #Powerful #Men

God sinks into dust before man.
-- Max Stirner

#God #Men #Dust

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.
-- Max Stirner

#Giving #Property