Max Stirner Quotes on Freedom
Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1844) gave the post-Hegelian Vormärz period its most uncompromising philosophical statement of egoist freedom. The central polemic is directed at every cause to which the individual ego is asked to subordinate itself — God, humanity, the state, society, morality, even the proletariat of his contemporary Marx — each of which Stirner treats as a “spook” or fixed idea that has displaced the only genuinely real interest, the unique self in its concrete particularity. The framework — from which Marx and Engels devoted the bulk of The German Ideology to dissociating themselves — became a foundational text for individualist anarchism, influenced Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, and recurs in the twentieth-century existentialist, anarchist, and post-structuralist reflection on the unconditional self.
Quotes
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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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“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. -
Attributed to Max Stirner:
“Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head.”
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“I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique.”
Dover 2005, p. 366 -
“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 -
“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 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 -
“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