The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime.
The divine is God’s concern; the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is – unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!
My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.
Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.
Religion itself is without genius. There is no religious genius and no one would be permitted to distinguish between the talented and the untalented in religion.
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.
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 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.
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.
The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth’s service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. “The truth” outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself.
Nothing is more to me than myself.
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.
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.
Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
We don’t call it sin today, we call it self-expression.
The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.
It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation – that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness.