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
Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.
We don't call it sin today, we call it self-expression.
Before what is 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.
One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.
Nothing is more to me than myself.
People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.
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.
Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
Crimes spring from fixed ideas.
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.
What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commmonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish.