The Ego and Its Own Quotes

“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. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“All things are Nothing to Me”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“I love men too — not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Political liberty,” what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual’s independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s subjection in the State and to the State’s laws... Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“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, The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority

“My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“There are intellectual vagabonds, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquility to thousands, they overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their imprudent criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“If i cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself with *your* essence are valuable to me.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“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.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“You call me the unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am—for you; but I am so only because you bring me into opposition to the human, and I could despise myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized into this opposition. I was contemptible because I sought my 'better self' outside me; I was the unhuman because I dreamed of the 'human'; I resembled the pious who hunger for their 'true self' and always remain 'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in comparison to another; enough, I was not all in all, was not—unique.[102] But now I cease to appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself and let myself be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me: consequently—adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it now no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic; yet not the egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human, humane, and unselfish, but the egoistic as the—unique.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“The web of hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“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. Consequently,do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others...He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“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, The Ego And His Own: The Case Of The Individual Against Authority

“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, The Ego and His Own: Max Stirner's Provocative Exploration of Individualism and Self-Interest

“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, The Ego and Its Own

“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, The Ego and Its Own

“But who is this self that is to be renounced and to have no benefit? It seems that *you* yourself are supposed to be it. And for whose benefit is unselfish self-renunciation recommended to you? Again, for *your* benefit and behoof, only through that unselfishness you are procuring your "true benefit." You are to benefit *yourself*, and yet you are not to seek *your* benefit”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“The true human being doesn't lie in the future, an object of longing, but rather it lies in the present, existing and actual. However and whoever I may be, joyful and sorrowful, a child or an old man, in confidence or doubt, asleep or awake, I am it. I am the true human being.”
― Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property

“Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe!”
― Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum

“Entitled or unentitled — that does not concern me, if I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered, and need no other empowering and entitling.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Our whole education system is calculated to produce *feelings* in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out...Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are 'pronounced of age." Our equipment consists of "elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims,eternal principles.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on 'institutions'. It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego And His Own

“He who has might has—right; if you have not the former, neither have you the latter. Is this wisdom so hard to attain?”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Now do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant? On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary! One may even call it an article of fashion in the civilized world, which is considered so indispensable that, if it cost too much in solid material, people adorn themselves with its counterfeit tinsel and feign it.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“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, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum

“Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own