Max Stirner Quotes
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If a concept lacks an essence, nothing will ever be found that completely fits that concept. If you are lacking in the concept of human being, it will immediately expose that you are something individual, something that cannot be expressed by the term human being, thus, in every instance, an individual human being.
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Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
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'Freedom' awakens your rage against everything that is not you; 'egoism' calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment.
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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?
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Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.
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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.
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The tiger that assails me is in the right, and I who strike him down am also in the right. I defend against him not my right, but myself.
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Liberty of the people is not my liberty!
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Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
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On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there is the matter ended,-to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern.
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The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit 'which builds its own body.'
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People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.
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Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection Empörung leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on 'institutions.'
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What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
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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.
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Wollen wir etwa die Pädagogik den Philosophen in die Hände spielen? Nichts weniger als das! Sie würden sich ungeschickt genug benehmen. Denen allein werde sie anvertraut, die mehr sind als Philosophen, darum aber auch unendlich mehr als Humanisten oder Realisten.
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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!
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Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.
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... Because the Egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the state except: 'Get out of my sunshine!'
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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.
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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?
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If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.
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... 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.
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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.