Quotes from book
The Ego and Its Own

Max Stirner Original title Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (German, 1844)

The Ego and Its Own is an 1844 work by German philosopher Max Stirner. It presents a radically nominalist and individualist critique of Christianity, nationalism, and traditional morality on one hand; and on the other, humanism, utilitarianism, liberalism, and much of the then-burgeoning socialist movement, advocating instead an amoral egoism. It is considered a major influence on the development of anarchism, existentialism, nihilism, and postmodernism.In 2010, John F. Welsh coined the term dialectical egoism for the thoughts of Stirner expressed in this work, in order to emphasize the distinction from the negative and pejorative connotations from the common everyday use of egoism in the sense of egotism.

“All things are Nothing to Me”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Source: The Ego and Its Own

“Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection [Empörung] leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

S. Byington, trans. (1913), p. 421
The Ego and Its Own (1844)
Context: Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection [Empörung] leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on “institutions.”

“The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime.””

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
As quoted in The Great Quotations (1960) by George Seldes, p. 664
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Liberty of the people is not my liberty!”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 190
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and … only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature in one.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Ich setze Mich nicht voraus, weil Ich Mich jeden Augenblick überhaupt erst setze oder schaffe, und nur dadurch Ich bin, dass Ich nicht vorausgesetzt, sondern gesetzt bin, und wiederum nur in dem Moment gesetzt, wo ich mich setze, d.h. Ich bin Schöpfer un Geschöpf in Einem.
Cambridge 1995, p. 135
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man ‘entitles’ him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the ‘sanctuary of his inner nature’ (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my — might.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 219
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 296, 297
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“I say: 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 everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. […] 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 book The Ego and Its Own

New York 1907, p. 187
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church, … without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon,—so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman’s delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them—lays hands on the sacred!”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 44
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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 book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 162
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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 book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 163
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“"Freedom" awakens your rage against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 163
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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 book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, pp. 61-62
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Feuerbach … recognizes … "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God’s sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only.” Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man’s sake, or for morality’s sake, for Man’s sake, and so—for homo homini Deus—for God’s sake?”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 56
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

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

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 242
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 182
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“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 book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 237
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Whether nature gives me a right, or whether God, the people's choice, etc., does so, all of that is the same foreign right, a right that I do not give or take to myself. Thus the Communists say, equal labour entitles man to equal enjoyment. […] No, equal labour does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to enjoyment. But, if you have laboured and let the enjoyment be taken from you, then – ‘it serves you right.’ If you take the enjoyment, it is your right; if, on the contrary, you only pine for it without laying hands on it, it remains as before, a, ‘well-earned right’ of those who are privileged for enjoyment. It is their right, as by laying hands on it would become your right.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 170, 171
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

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

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Dover 2005, p. 236
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of — lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; — are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

New York 1907, p. 54, 55
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

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