Quote

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

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Max Stirner
Age: 49 †
Born: 1806
Born: October 25
Died: 1856
Died: June 26
Educator
Journalist
Philosopher
Professor Of Philosophy
Translator
Writer
Johann Kaspar Schmidt
Power
Confidence
Occupy
Thing
Judgment
Powerless
People
Toward
Declaration
Short
Knees
Lose
Humble
Attitude
Sacred
Bending
Loses
Conscience
Declaring
Sense
Atheism
Knee

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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.
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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.
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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.
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The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.
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Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
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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.
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If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves!
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Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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God sinks into dust before man.
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In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud—crime, doesn't it rumble in the distant thunder, and don't you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?
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We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
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What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.
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Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.
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Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the true man, and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man.
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The people is dead! Good-day, Self!
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A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
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