Max Stirner

About the author

Max Stirner, Forefather of Individualist Anarchism

Born Johann Kaspar Schmidt on 25 October 1806 in Bayreuth, Germany, Max Stirner renamed himself after his high school nickname based on his high forehead (Stirn in German). Stirner was a philosopher who is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, postmodernism, and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. His main work The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Unique And Its Property, was first published in 1845 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations.

Stirner's philosophical ideas were a significant influence on Marx and Nietzsche, among others. He proposed that most commonly accepted social institutions—including the notion of State, property as a right, natural rights in general, and the very notion of society—were mere illusions or ghosts in the mind, saying of society that the individuals are its reality. His thoughts drastically contributed to the anarchist movement, with him being viewed as a central figure in its development. Stirner died on 26 June 1856 in Berlin.

Date of Birth: 25 October 1806

Date of Death: 26 June 1856

Country of Birth: Germany

Political Ideas: Egoism, Individual Anarchism

Quotes Available: 42

Quotes by Max Stirner

You must liberate your ego from all limitedness so entirely that it becomes a human ego.

The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual to make him subject to some generality or other;

The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit. The Invisible Committee Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on institutions

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.

All things are Nothing to Me

What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them?

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.

Never does a State aim to bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to the purpose of the State.

It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I l myself, and through it am I my property.

Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?

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!

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 every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest... he who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means.

God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one.

What you have the power to be you have the right to be.

The poor are to blame for there being rich men.

Why, liberty of the press is only permission of the press, and the state never will or can voluntarily permit me to grind it to nothingness by the press.

The only thing I am not entitled to is what I do not do with a free cheer, that is, that I do not entitle myself to.

That the communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of communism... If you were a "lazy-bones," he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would endeavour to cleanse him as a "lazy man" from laziness and to convert you to the faith that labor is man's "destiny and calling."

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

Freedom can only be the whole of freedom; a piece of freedom is not freedom.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.

Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new "supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance!"

I am unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind.

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine.

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.

What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

Every state is a despotism.

In a republic, all are lords, that is, all despotize one over another.

The republic is nothing whatever but absolute monarchy; for it makes no difference whether the monarch is called prince or people, both being a "majesty."

The state behaves as the same ruler that the church was. The latter rests on godliness, the former on morality.

The "equality of right" is a phantom just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace.

The state always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual - to make him subject to some generality or other.

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of conscience," that is, police business.

The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves.

A fist full of might goes farther than a bag full of rights.

He who has might has right... is this wisdom so hard to attain?

To be looked upon as a mere part, part of society, the individual cannot bear - because he is more; his uniqueness puts from it this limited conception.

It is not another state that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing.

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