Max Stirner
In The Ego and Its Own Stirner launches a radical anti-authoritarian and individualist critique of contemporary Prussian society, and modernity and modern western society as such, and offers an approach to human existence, which borders on the edge of language and reality.
Stirner loved liberty for himself, and loved to see any and all men and women taking liberty, and he had no lust of power. Democracy to him was sham liberty, egoism the genuine liberty.
"It is possible that I can make little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is better than what I allow to be made of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State." - Max Stirner
"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."
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
"All freedom is essentially self-liberation." -Max Stirner
"I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my oneness."
"Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many."
The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise!
"The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss"
http://max-stirner.biography.ms/
"If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning."
"When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic."
"In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness."
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."
"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination."
a interesting piece on Stirner and how he made a defensiveness and changes in the life of Marx, Frued, Nietzsche etc
http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/eninnuce.html
Max Stirner, a durable dissident (http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/eninnuce.html), 'How Marx and Nietzsche suppressed their colleague Max Stirner and why he has intellectually survived them'
Eduard von Hartmann - who claimed Nietsche plagerized Stirner
Stirner has been regarded as pioneering individualist feminism, in contrast to most other German philosophers of the time, since his objection to any absolute concept also clearly counts gender roles as 'spooks'.
The hard fist of morality treats the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion. - Max Stirner
