129 Quotes by 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.

Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.

Language or “the word” tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas.

I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours.

It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation – that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness.

Entitled or unentitled – that does not concern me, if I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered, and need no other empowering and entitling.

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?

He who has might has – right; if you have not the former, neither have you the latter. Is this wisdom so hard to attain?

Moral influence takes its start where humiliation begins; yes, it is nothing else than this humiliation itself, the breaking and bending of the temper down to humility.