Max Stirner Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Our whole education system is calculated to produce *feelings* in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out ... Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are 'pronounced of age." Our equipment consists of "elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims,eternal principles. — Max Stirner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spiritual men have taken into their head something that is to be realized. They have concepts of love, goodness, and the like, which they would like to see realized; therefore they want to set up a kingdom of love on earth, in which no one any longer acts from selfishness, but each one 'from love.' Love is to rule. — Max Stirner

He who must expend his life to prolong life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking for his life does not have it and can as little enjoy it. — Max Stirner

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

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

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

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

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

Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to "its bloom"! The individuals have died "for the great cause of the nation," and the nation sends some words of thanks after them and - has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism. — Max Stirner

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 every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently,do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others ... 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

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

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 homo homini Deus-for God's sake? — Max Stirner

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

For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he comes to the central point of his lunacy. — Max Stirner

If i cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself with *your* essence are valuable to me. — Max Stirner

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenants of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenant undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else — Max Stirner

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

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

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

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

Nothing is more to me than myself. — Max Stirner

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

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

The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it, i.e. model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the world according to his interest, not according to his ideals, becomes confirmed. — Max Stirner

Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, 'morality.' Morality is the 'idea' of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an 'intellectual' man, a so-called independent, a 'freethinker.' — Max Stirner

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

All things are Nothing to Me — Max Stirner

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

Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on institutions — Max Stirner

The people's good fortune is my misfortune! — Max Stirner

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

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

When the government designates as punishable all play of mind against the state, the moderate liberals come and opine that fun, satire, wit, humor, etc., must have free play anyhow, and genius must enjoy freedom. So not the individual man indeed, but still genius, is to be free. Here the state, or in its name the government, says with perfect right: He who is not for me is against me. — Max Stirner

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

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

Our athiests are pious people. — Max Stirner

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

The fixed idea may also be perceived as 'maxim', 'principle', 'standpoint', and the like. Archimedes,86 to move the earth, asked for a standpoint outside it. Men sought continually for this standpoint, and every one seized upon it as well as he was able. This foreign standpoint is the world oj mind, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences; it is heaven. Heaven is the 'standpoint' from which the earth is moved, earthly doings surveyed and - despised. To assure to themselves heaven, to occupy the heavenly standpoint firmly and for ever - how painfully and tirelessly humanity struggled for this! — Max Stirner

Moral spontaneity" corresponds entirely with "religious and orthodox philosophy", "constitutional monarchy", "the Christian state", "freedom with certain limits", or in a figure, to the hero fetters to a sick bed. — Max Stirner

For only he who is alive is in the right. — Max Stirner

Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let himself be determined by appetites. — 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

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

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

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

The people is dead! Good-day, Self! — Max Stirner

Political liberty, what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual's independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual's subjection in the State and to the State's laws ... Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery. — Max Stirner

Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause. — Max Stirner

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

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

Before the sacred, people lost 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 declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience. — Max Stirner

Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, 'conscience,' watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a 'matter of conscience,' i.e. police business. — Max Stirner

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

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

Crimes spring from fixed ideas. — Max Stirner

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

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime. — Max Stirner

You call me the unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am - for you; but I am so only because you bring me into opposition to the human, and I could despise myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized into this opposition. I was contemptible because I sought my 'better self' outside me; I was the unhuman because I dreamed of the 'human'; I resembled the pious who hunger for their 'true self' and always remain 'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in comparison to another; enough, I was not all in all, was not - unique.[102] But now I cease to appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself and let myself be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me: consequently - adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it now no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic; yet not the egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human, humane, and unselfish, but the egoistic as the - unique. — Max Stirner

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

Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc)culture, a tasteful judge (humanist). — Max Stirner

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

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

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

It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State. — Max Stirner

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

Now do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant? On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary! One may even call it an article of fashion in the civilized world, which is considered so indispensable that, if it cost too much in solid material, people adorn themselves with its counterfeit tinsel and feign it. — Max Stirner

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

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

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

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

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

It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation - that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness. — Max Stirner

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

Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! — Max Stirner

God sinks into dust before man. — Max Stirner

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

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

Here we come upon the old, old craze of the world, which has not yet learned to do without clericalism
that to live and work *for an idea*is man's calling, and according to the faithfulness its fulfilment his *human worth* is measured — Max Stirner

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

But who is this self that is to be renounced and to have no benefit? It seems that *you* yourself are supposed to be it. And for whose benefit is unselfish self-renunciation recommended to you? Again, for *your* benefit and behoof, only through that unselfishness you are procuring your "true benefit." You are to benefit *yourself*, and yet you are not to seek *your* benefit — Max Stirner

Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life." Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, aweapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding. — Max Stirner

Atheists are pious people. — Max Stirner

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