Top 70 Max Stirner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.”

— Max Stirner

2. “Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction.”

— Max Stirner

3. “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, and it is not a general one, but is – unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!”

— Max Stirner

4. “The State practices “violence,” the individual must not do so. The state’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime”.”

— Max Stirner

5. “Nothing is more to me than myself.”

— Max Stirner

6. “If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves!”

— Max Stirner

7. “Liberty of the people is not my liberty!”

— Max Stirner

8. “A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.”

— Max Stirner

9. “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.”

— Max Stirner

10. “The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime.”

— Max Stirner

11. “The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.”

— Max Stirner

12. “Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.”

— Max Stirner

13. “The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from persons, from personal dominion, from the master; the securing of each individual person against other persons, personal freedom.”

— Max Stirner

14. “The people’s good fortune is my misfortune!”

— Max Stirner

15. “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.”

— Max Stirner

16. “The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the immoral man. He who is not moral is immoral! and accordingly reprobate, despicable, etc. Therefore, the moral man can never comprehend the egoist.”

— Max Stirner

17. “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.”

— Max Stirner

18. “God sinks into dust before man.”

— Max Stirner

19. “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.””

— Max Stirner

20. “We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.”

— Max Stirner

21. “My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.”

— Max Stirner

22. “Crimes spring from fixed ideas.”

— Max Stirner

23. “What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing.”

— Max Stirner

24. “Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many.”

— Max Stirner

25. “Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit.”

— Max Stirner

26. “He who must expend his life to prolong life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking for his life does not have it and can as little enjoy it.”

— Max Stirner

27. “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.”

— Max Stirner

28. “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.”

— Max Stirner

29. “Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.”

— Max Stirner

30. “Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority.”

— Max Stirner

31. “The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.”

— Max Stirner

32. “What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.”

— Max Stirner

33. “For only he who is alive is in the right.”

— Max Stirner

34. “Our athiests are pious people.”

— Max Stirner

35. “From the moment when he catches sight of the light of the world, a man seeks to find out himself and get hold of himself out of its confusion, in which he, with everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture.”

— Max Stirner

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

— Max Stirner

37. “The people is dead! Good-day, Self!”

— Max Stirner

38. “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?”

— Max Stirner

39. “What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants?”

— Max Stirner

40. “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.”

— Max Stirner

41. “All things are Nothing to Me.”

— Max Stirner

42. “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.”

— Max Stirner

43. “If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more.”

— Max Stirner

44. “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.”

— Max Stirner

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

— Max Stirner

46. “I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!”

— Max Stirner

47. “It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.”

— Max Stirner

48. “Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?”

— Max Stirner

49. “We don’t call it sin today, we call it self-expression.”

— Max Stirner

50. “People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.”

— Max Stirner