Max Stirner

“ If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.
Certainly, the absolute liberty of the press is like every absolute liberty, a nonentity. The press can become free from full many a thing, but always only from what I too am free from. If we make ourselves free from the sacred, if we have become graceless and lawless, our words too will become so. ”

“ Liberalism appears as the last attempt at a creation of the liberty of the people, a liberty of the commune, of "society," of the general, of mankind; the dream of a humanity, a people, a commune, a "society," that shall be of age.
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. ”

“ Only as one of my feelings do I harbour love; but as a power above me, as a divine power, as Feuerbach says, as a passion that I am not to cast off, as a religious and moral duty, I - scorn it. As my feeling it is mine; as a principle to which I consecrate and "vow" my soul it is a dominator and divine, just as hatred as a principle is diabolical; one not better than the other. In short, egoistic love, my love, is neither holy nor unholy, neither divine nor diabolical.
"A love that is limited by faith is an untrue love. ”

“ Thinking life is called "intellectual life"! Only mind lives, its life is the true life. Then, just so in nature only the "eternal laws," the mind or the reason of nature, are its true life. In man, as in nature, only the thought lives; everything else is dead! To this abstraction, to the life of generalities or of that which is lifeless, the history of mind had to come. God, who is spirit, alone lives. Nothing lives but the ghost.
How can one try to assert of modern philosophy or modern times that they have reached freedom, since they have not freed us from the power of objectivity? ”

“ I am owner of humanity, am humanity, and do nothing for the good of another humanity. Fool, you who are a unique humanity, that you make a merit of wanting to live for another than you are.
The hitherto-considered relation of me to the world of men offers such a wealth of phenomena that it will have to be taken up again and again on other occasions, but here, where it was only to have its chief outlines made clear to the eye, it must be broken off to make place for an apprehension of two other sides toward which it radiates. ”

“ Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active workmen, do with it as much as - can be done with it! The world lies despised at our feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer thrust and its stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as it may pose, it can delude nothing but our sense; it cannot lead astray the spirit - and spirit alone, after all, we really are. Having once got back of things, the spirit has also got above them, and become free from their bonds, emancipated, supernal, free. ”

“ It is a different thing whether I rebound from an ego or from a people, a generalization. There I am my opponent's opponent, born his equal; here I am a despised opponent, bound and under a guardian: there I stand man to man; here I am a schoolboy who can accomplish nothing against his comrade because the latter has called father and mother to aid and has crept under the apron, while I am well scolded as an ill-bred brat, and I must not "argue": there I fight against a bodily enemy; here against mankind, against a generalization, against a "majesty," against a spook. ”

“ This stem life-and-death combat with reason enters later, and begins a new phase; in childhood we scamper about without racking our brains much.
Mind is the name of the first self-discovery, the first undeification of the divine; that is, of the uncanny, the spooks, the "powers above." Our fresh feeling of youth, this feeling of self, now defers to nothing; the world is discredited, for we are above it, we are mind. ”

“ That it may develop, it causes nations and individuals to wear themselves out in its service, and, when they have accomplished what mankind needs, it throws them on the dung-heap of history in gratitude. Is not mankind's cause - a purely egoistic cause?
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? ”

“ Every people, every state, is unjust toward the egoist.
As long as there still exists even one institution which the individual may not dissolve, the ownness and self-appurtenance of Me is still very remote. How can I be free when I must bind myself by oath to a constitution, a charter, a law, "vow body and soul" to my people? How can I be my own when my faculties may develop only so far as they "do not disturb the harmony of society" (Weitling) ?
The fall of peoples and mankind will invite me to my rise. ”

“ On the contrary, Communism, by the abolition of all personal property, only presses me back still more into dependence on another, namely, on the generality or collectivity; and, loudly as it always attacks the "state," what it intends is itself again a state, a status, a condition hindering my free movement, a sovereign power over me. Communism rightly revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors; but still more horrible is the might that it puts in the hands of the collectivity.
Egoism takes another way to root out the non-possessing rabble. ”

“ I am the annihilator of its continuance, for in the creator's realm it no longer forms a realm of its own, not a state in the state, but a creature of my creative - thoughtlessness. Only together and at the same time with the benumbed thinking world can the world of Christians, Christianity and religion itself, come to its downfall; only when thoughts run out are there no more believers. To the thinker his thinking is a "sublime labour, a sacred activity," and it rests on a firm faith, the faith in truth. ”

“ Now for the first time one is a real possessor, because what one has in his labour-force can no longer escape from him as it was continually threatening to do under the system of competition. One is a care-free and assured possessor. And one is this precisely by seeking his competence no longer in a ware, but in his own labour, his competence for labour; and therefore by being a ragamuffin, a man of only ideal wealth. I, however, cannot content myself with the little that I scrape up by my competence for labour, because my competence does not consist merely in my labour. ”

“ Truth is the free thought, the free idea, the free spirit; truth is what is free from you, what is not your own, what is not in your power. But truth is also the completely unindependent, impersonal, unreal, and incorporeal; truth cannot step forward as you do, cannot move, change, develop; truth awaits and receives everything from you, and itself is only through you; for it exists only - in your head. You concede that the truth is a thought, but say that not every thought is a true one, or, as you are also likely to express it, not every thought is truly and really a thought. ”

“ If a society is more than you, then it is more to you than yourself; a union is only your instrument, or the sword with which you sharpen and increase your natural force; the union exists for you and through you, the society conversely lays claim to you for itself and exists even without you, in short, the society is sacred, the union your own; consumes you, you consume the union. ”

“ The state always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual - to make him subject to some generality or other; it lasts only so long as the individual is not all in all, and it is only the clearly-marked restriction of me, my limitation, my slavery. Never does a state aim to bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to the purpose of the state. Through the state nothing in common comes to pass either, as little as one can call a piece of cloth the common work of all the individual parts of a machine ”

“ Would not one think that now everybody could possess the Holy Spirit, take up into himself the idea of humanity, bring mankind to form and existence in himself?
No, the spirit is not stripped of its holiness and robbed of its unapproachableness, is not accessible to us, not our property; for the spirit of humanity is not my spirit. My ideal it may be, and as a thought I call it mine; the thought of humanity is my property, and I prove this sufficiently by propounding it quite according to my views, and shaping it today so, tomorrow otherwise ”

“ I am man, and you are man: but "man" is only a thought, a generality; neither I nor you are speakable, we are unutterable, because only thoughts are speakable and consist in speaking.
Let us therefore not aspire to community, but to one-sidedness. Let us not seek the most comprehensive commune, "human society," but let us seek in others only means and organs which we may use as our property! As we do not see our equals in the tree, the beast, so the presupposition that others are our equals springs from a hypocrisy. ”

“ If a union has crystallized into a society, it has ceased to be a coalition; for coalition is an incessant self-uniting; it has become a unitedness, come to a standstill, degenerated into a fixity; it is - dead as a union, it is the corpse of the union or the coalition, it is - society, community. A striking example of this kind is furnished by the party.
That a society (such as the society of the state) diminishes my liberty offends me little. Why, I have to let my liberty be limited by all sorts of powers and by every one who is stronger ”

“ Now the Nationals are exerting themselves to set up the abstract, lifeless unity of beehood; but the self-owned are going to fight for the unity willed by their own will, for union. This is the token of all reactionary wishes, that they want to set up something general, abstract, an empty, lifeless concept, in distinction from which the self-owned aspire to relieve the robust, lively particular from the trashy burden of generalities. The reactionaries would be glad to smite a people, a nation, forth from the earth; the self-owned have before their eyes only themselves. ”

“ I am my species, am without norm, without law, without model, and the like. It is possible that I can make very little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is 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. Better - if the talk is to be of better at all - better an unmannerly child than an old head on young shoulders, better a mulish man than a man compliant in everything. The unmannerly and mulish fellow is still on the way to form himself according to his own will ”

“ The press is my property from the moment when nothing is more to me than myself; for from this moment state, Church, people, society, and the like, cease, because they have to thank for their existence only the disrespect that I have for myself, and with the vanishing of this undervaluation they themselves are extinguished: they exist only when they exist above me, exist only as powers and power-holders. Or can you imagine a state whose citizens one and all think nothing of it? ”

“ The Nationals are in the right; one cannot deny his nationality: and the humanitarians are in the right; one must not remain in the narrowness of the national. In uniqueness the contradiction is solved; the national is my quality. But I am not swallowed up in my quality - as the human too is my quality, but I give to man his existence first through my uniqueness.
History seeks for Man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious essence, as the divine, first as God, then as Man (humanity, humaneness, and mankind) , he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one. ”

“ That is impossible, because Man has no limits. I have some indeed, but then it is only mine that concern me any, and only they can be overcome by me. A human ego I cannot become, just because I am I and not merely man.
Yet let us still see whether criticism has not taught us something that we can lay to heart! I am not free if I am not without interests, not man if I am not disinterested? Well, even if it makes little difference to me to be free or man, yet I do not want to leave unused any occasion to realize myself or make myself count. ”

“ In Hegel it comes to light at last what a longing for things even the most cultured man has, and what a horror of every "hollow theory" he harbours. With him reality, the world of things, is altogether to correspond to the thought, and no concept is to be without reality. This caused Hegel's system to be known as the most objective, as if in it thought and thing celebrated their union. But this was simply the extremest case of violence on the part of thought, its highest pitch of despotism and sole dominion, the triumph of mind, and with it the triumph of philosophy. ”

“ The spirit has not yet lost its divinity, its holiness, its sacredness. To be sure, it has long ceased to flutter over our heads as a dove; to be sure, it no longer gladdens its saints alone, but lets itself be caught by the laity too; but as spirit of humanity, as spirit of Man, it remains still an alien spirit to me or you, still far from becoming our unrestricted property, which we dispose of at our pleasure. ”

“ But who, then, will dissolve the spirit into its nothing? He who by means of the spirit set forth nature as the null, finite, transitory, he alone can bring down the spirit too to like nullity. I can; each one among you can, who does his will as an absolute I; in a word, the egoist can.
Before the sacred, people lose 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 my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience. ”