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
Loses
Conscience
Declaring
Sense
Atheism
Knee
Power
Confidence
Occupy
Thing
Judgment
Powerless
People
Toward
Declaration
Short
Knees
Lose
Humble
Attitude
Sacred
Bending

More quotes by Max Stirner

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Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety a person of good breeding is one into whom good maxims have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in.
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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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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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The people is dead! Good-day, Self!
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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 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.
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Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.
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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.
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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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Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.
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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?
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Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
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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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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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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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We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.
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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.
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God sinks into dust before man.
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If man puts his honor first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, this in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes a strange impenetrable object a barrier and a hindrance to his self-knowledge.
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Crimes spring from fixed ideas.
Max Stirner