Max Stirner Quotes
Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who wrote under the pen name Max Stirner, was a German philosopher and the principal exponent of philosophical egoism. A regular at the Berlin circle of the Young Hegelians known as Die Freien, he taught for many years at a girls' academy in Berlin and translated Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say into German. The quotes below are attributed to Max Stirner, organized by topic.
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Max Stirner on Death
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“Wollen wir etwa die Pädagogik den Philosophen in die Hände spielen? Nichts weniger als das! Sie würden sich ungeschickt genug benehmen. Denen allein werde sie anvertraut, die mehr sind als Philosophen, darum aber auch unendlich mehr als Humanisten oder Realisten.”
Do we want to put pedagogy into the hands of the philosophers? Nothing less than that! They would behave themselves awkwardly enough. It shall be entrusted only to those who are more than philosophers, who are in that respect more even than humanists or realists. | p. 19 -
“Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought , belief , and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will , will be nourished with its most noble juices.”
p. 19
Max Stirner on Freedom
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Attributed to Max Stirner:
“I have set my cause on nothing.”
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Attributed to Max Stirner:
“All causes higher than my own are spooks.”
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“I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique.”
Dover 2005, p. 366 -
“In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness . Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only "useful citizens" out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people. Our good background of recalcitrancy [sic] gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school is then philistinism.”
p. 23 -
“If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.”
p. 23
Max Stirner on God
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“The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit "which builds its own body.”
p. 21
Max Stirner on Knowledge
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“Do we want to put pedagogy into the hands of the philosophers? Nothing less than that! They would behave themselves awkwardly enough. It shall be entrusted only to those who are more than philosophers, who are in that respect more even than humanists or realists.”
Wollen wir etwa die Pädagogik den Philosophen in die Hände spielen? Nichts weniger als das! Sie würden sich ungeschickt genug benehmen. Denen allein werde sie anvertraut, die mehr sind als Philosophen, darum aber auch unendlich mehr als Humanisten oder Realisten. -
“It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical behavior, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in the same measure as it is not used : one shakes off the dust of the school.”
p. 22 -
“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.”
p. 23
Max Stirner on Mind
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Attributed to Max Stirner:
“Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head.”
Max Stirner on Nature
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“On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there is the matter ended,— to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern.”
p. 22
Max Stirner on Politics
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“The state calls its own violence law, that of the individual crime.”
The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime. -
“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 .”
p. 12