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Quotes from The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property — Max Stirner

1806–1856 Germany

← All quotes by Max Stirner

36 quotes

You long for freedom? You fools! If you took might, freedom would come of itself.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

"Freedom" awakens your rage against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

Liberty of the people is not my liberty!

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

The republic is nothing whatever but – absolute monarchy; for it makes no difference whether the monarch is called prince or people, both being a 'majesty'.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime.”

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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?

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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.”

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

What is not supposed to be my concern!

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

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.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

A people cannot be free otherwise than at the individual's expense; for it is not the individual that is the main point in this liberty, but the people. The freer the people, the more bound the individual; the Athenian people, precisely at its freest time, created ostracism, banished the atheists, poisoned the most honest thinker.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

If religion has put forward the proposition that we are all of us sinners, I set another against it: we are all of us perfect! Because, in each moment, we are all we can be, and never need to be more.

The Ego and Its Own / The Unique and Its Property (1845)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Max Stirner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.