Max Stirner's Quotes

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

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.

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

Atheists are pious people.

Crimes spring from fixed ideas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.