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.
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.
Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.
Crimes spring from fixed ideas.
Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns - they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.
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?
Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right."
He who is infatuated with 'Man' leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.
Before the sacred, people lost 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 declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience.
Before the 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.
Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!