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

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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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The people is dead! Good-day, Self!
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The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
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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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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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No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commmonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish.
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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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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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God sinks into dust before man.
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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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If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself.
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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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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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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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Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
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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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Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.
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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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People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me.
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When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks if I only have my dear life, he does not apply his full strength to using, i. e., enjoying, life.
Max Stirner