Max Stirner - The Ego and His Own - 1844

The Case Of The Individual Against Authority

Claimed repeatedly to be the most radical book ever written, The Ego And Its Own throws down a challenge to thousands of years of religious, philosophical and political depreciation of the individual. Criticising all doctrines and beliefs that demand the interests of the individual be subordinated to those of God, state, humanity, society, or some other fiction, Stirner declared war on all creeds that threatened individuality. In doing so, he championed a form of amoral egoism which still provokes cries of horror from moralists of right and left, religious and secular. The classic, from one of the founding fathers of anarchist thought, and a passionate defence of the individual against all forms of authority.

Nietsche plagerized Stirner; 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' ; "The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination." ; The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise! ; "I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my oneness." ; "All freedom is essentially self-liberation." ; "The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime." ; "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." ; "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."

quotes:

'If an age is imbued with an error, some always derive advantage from the error, while the rest have to suffer from it.' (Max Stirner, The Ego and his Own, page 149)

'Competition, in which alone civil or political life unrolls itself, is a game of luck through and through, from the speculations of the exchange down to the solicitation of offices, the hunt for customers, looking for work, aspiring to promotion and decorations, the second-hand dealer's petty haggling, etc.' (Max Stirner, The Ego and his Own, page 159)

'It is not man that makes up your greatness, but
you create it, because you are more than man, and
mightier than other men.
It is believed that one cannot be more than man.
Rather, one cannot be less!' (Max Stirner, The Ego and his Own, page 176)

'Criticism offers me this occasion by the teaching
that, if anything plants itself firmly in me, and
becomes indissoluble, I become its prisoner and servant, i. e. a possessed man. An interest, be it for
what it may, has kidnapped a slave in me if I cannot get away from it, and is no longer my property, but I am its. Let us therefore accept criticism's lesson to let no part of our property become stable, and to feel comfortable only in dissolving it.' (Max Stirner, The Ego and his Own, page 188)

'I am creator and creature in one.' (Max Stirner, The Ego and his Own, page 200)