Max Stirner
Max Stirner
Johann Kaspar Schmidt, better known as Max Stirner, was a German philosopher. He is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism, and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own. This work was first published in 1845 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth25 October 1806
CountryGermany
Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.
Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.
Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
The people is dead! Good-day, Self!
Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority.
Crimes spring from fixed ideas.
The people’s good fortune is my misfortune!
We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
Then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be somewhat expressed as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.
For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!
What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
There are intellectual vagabonds, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquility to thousands, they overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their imprudent criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds.