Quotes from Max Stirner

Moral influence takes its start where humiliation begins; yes, it is nothing else than this humiliation itself, the breaking and bending of the temper down to humility.

To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled.

Alles Heilige ist ein Band, eine Fessel.

The true human being doesn't lie in the future, an object of longing, but rather it lies in the present, existing and actual. However and whoever I may be, joyful and sorrowful, a child or an old man, in confidence or doubt, asleep or awake, I am it. I am the true human being.

Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property

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?

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.

Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.

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!

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.

He who has might has—right; if you have not the former, neither have you the latter. Is this wisdom so hard to attain?

Entitled or unentitled — that does not concern me, if I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered, and need no other empowering and entitling.

Habt nur den Mut, destruktiv zu sein, und ihr werdet bald sehen, welch' herrliche Blume der Eintracht aus der fruchtbaren Asche aufschießt.

Das Göttliche ist Gottes Sache, das Menschliche Sache "des Menschen". Meine Sache ist weder das Göttliche noch das Menschliche, ist nicht das Wahre, Gute, Rechte, Freie usw., sondern allein das Meinige, und sie ist keine allgemeine, sondern ist - einzig, wie Ich einzig bin.

Do I write out of love for human beings? No, I write because I want to give my thoughts an existence in this world; and even if I thought that these thoughts would take away your rest and peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the destruction of many generations sprouting from this seed of thought: — still I would scatter it

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.

All things are nothing to me.

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.

Das Gefängnis betritt man gewöhnlich nicht freiwillig und bleibt auch selten freiwillig darin, sondern hegt das egoistische Verlangen nach Freiheit.

The egoist, turning against the demands and concepts of the present, executes pitilessly the most measureless — desecration. Nothing is holy to him! It would be foolish to assert 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 out friend and be humble toward it.

Betrachtet einmal das Volk, das von ergebenen Patrioten geschützt wird. Die Patrioten fallen im blutigen Kampfe oder im Kampfe mit Hunger und Not; was fragt das Volk danach? Das Volk wird durch den Dünger ihrer Leichen ein "blühendes Volk"! Die Individuen sind "für die große Sache des Volkes" gestorben, und das Volk schickt ihnen einige Worte des Dankes nach und - hat den Profit davon. Das nenn' Ich Mir einen einträglichen Egoismus.

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

Dem Geiste, der nach langem Mühen die Welt los geworden ist, dem weltlosen Geiste, bleibt nach dem Verluste der Welt und des Weltlichen nichts übrig, als - der Geist und das Geistige.

Mit dem Ideal der absoluten Freiheit wird dasselbe Unwesen getrieben wie mit allem Absoluten.