Max Stirner Quotes

• The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime

  Max Stirner

  Libertarian Party, Government, Law

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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.

  Max Stirner

  Freedom, Fall, Men

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• 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, Give Me, Property

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• 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

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• 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

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• Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.

  Max Stirner

  Taken, Liberty, Granted

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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!

  Max Stirner

  Unique, Men, Etc

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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.

  Max Stirner

  Religious, Real, Men

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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, Heart, School

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

  Max Stirner

  Self, Expression, Cynical

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• 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, Order, Air

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• The people is dead! Good-day, Self!

  Max Stirner

  Good Day, Self, People

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• 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

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• 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, Break Through, Tears

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• Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.

  Max Stirner

  Ties, Sacred, Fetters

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Max Stirner

  Law, Grace, Fiction

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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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  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

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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?

  Max Stirner

  Justice, Humanity, Desire

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• 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

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