Max Stirner quotes

Max Stirner was a German philosopher and writer, widely recognized for his work "The Ego and Its Own." His radical ideas on individualism and the rejection of societal norms made him a significant figure in the field of existentialism and anarchism. He influenced later thinkers and remains a controversial and provocative presence in modern philosophy. Here are 65 of his quotes:

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

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

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

Now, on the contrary, 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 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

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

Max Stirner

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

Max Stirner

Liberty of the people is not my liberty!

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 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

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.

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

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

Max Stirner

Whether nature gives me a right, or whether God, the people's choice, etc., does so, all of that is the same foreign right, a right that I do not give or take to myself. Thus the Communists say, equal labour entitles man to equal enjoyment. [...] No, equal labour does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to enjoyment. But, if you have laboured and let the enjoyment be taken from you, then – ‘it serves you right.' If you take the enjoyment, it is your right; if, on the contrary, you only pine for it without laying hands on it, it remains as before, a, ‘well-earned right' of those who are privileged for enjoyment. It is their right, as by laying hands on it would become your right.

Max Stirner

Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right one. [...] Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends on us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to make us creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? [...] Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question.

Max Stirner