“Power [Gewalt; 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’. You long for freedom? You fools! If you took might, freedom would come of itself. See, one who has might ‘stands above the law’. How does this prospect taste to you, you ‘law-abiding’ people? But you have no taste!”

— Max Stirner

“The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science (341)

Das ist wahrscheinlich das Schönste, was ich in meinem ganzen Leben gelesen habe!

"The eternal yea to life"
(passive nihilism, denial of life vs active nihilism, affirmation of life)

“The fact that the Anarchist move­ment for which I have striven so long is to a certain extent in abeyance and overshadowed by philosophies of au­thority and coercion affects me with concern, but not with despair. It seems to me a point of special signifi­cance that many countries decline to admit Anarchists. All governments hold the view that while parties of the right and left may advocate social changes, still they cling to the idea of government and authority. Anar­chism alone breaks with both and propagates uncompromising rebellion. In the long run, therefore, it is Anar­chism which is considered deadlier to the present regime than all other social theories that are now clamoring for power.

Considered from this angle, I think my life and my work have been suc­cessful. What is generally regarded as success—acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige—I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished—his development has stopped at that point. I have always striven to re­main in a state of flux and continued growth, and not to petrify in a niche of self-satisfaction. If I had my life to live over again, like anyone else, I should wish to alter minor details. But in any of my more important ac­tions and attitudes I would repeat my life as I have lived it. Certainly I should work for Anarchism with the same devotion and confidence in its ultimate triumph.”

— Emma Goldman,
Was My Life Worth Living? (III)

“But ‘the egoist is someone who thinks only of himself!’ — This would be someone who doesn’t know and relish all the joys that come from participation with others, i.e., from thinking of others as well, someone who lacks countless pleasures — thus a poor sort. But why should this desolate loner be an egoist in comparison to richer sorts? Certainly, for a long time, we were able to get used to considering poverty a disgrace, as a crime, and the sacred socialists have clearly proven that the poor are treated like criminals. But sacred socialists treat those who are in their eyes contemptibly poor in this way, just as much as the bourgeoisie do it to their poor.

But why should the person who is poorer with respect to a certain interest be called more egoistic than the one who possesses that interest? Is the oyster more egoistic than the dog; is the Moor more egoistic than the German; is the poor, scorned, Jewish junkman more egoistic than the enthusiastic socialist; is the vandal who destroys artworks for which he feels nothing more egoistic than the art connoisseur who treats the same works with great love and care because he has a feeling and interest for them? And now if someone — we leave it open whether such a one can be shown to exist — doesn’t find any ‘human’ interest in human beings, if he doesn’t know how to appreciate them as human beings, wouldn’t he be a poorer egoist with regard to this interest rather than being, as the enemies of egoism claim, a model of egoism? One who loves a human being is richer, thanks to this love, than another who doesn’t love anyone. But there is no distinction between egoism and non-egoism in this at all, because both are only pursuing their own interest.”

— Max Stirner, Stirner's Critics

“Egoism, as Stirner uses it, is not opposed to love nor to thought; it is no enemy of the sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice; it is no enemy of intimate warmth, but it is also no enemy of critique, nor of socialism, nor, in short, of any actual interest. It doesn’t exclude any interest. It is directed against only disinterestedness and the uninteresting; not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialists, etc.

The ‘exclusiveness’ of the egoist, which some want to pass off as isolation, separation, loneliness, is on the contrary full participation in the interesting by — exclusion of the uninteresting.

No one gives Stirner credit for his global intercourse and his union of egoists from the largest section of his book, ‘My Intercourse’.”

— Max Stirner, Stirner's Critics

Neoliberal manipulation, capitalist totalitarianism

“The impossible class. – Poor, happy and independent! – these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! – these things can also go together – and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition – I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations – the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbor, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived – until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans [triumphant beast] dawns in all its glory? – In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!’ This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Dawn of Day (206)

Liberals and overt totalitarianism vs covert totalitarianism

"Define woman"

“Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and weakened instincts?—as was the case with the Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us ‘modern’ men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to fullness of existence? Is there perhaps suffering in overfullness itself? A seductive fortitude with the keenest of glances, which yearns for the terrible, as for the enemy, the worthy enemy, with whom it may try its strength? from whom it is willing to learn what ‘fear’ is? What means tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest, bravest era? And the prodigious phenomenon of the Dionysian? And that which was born thereof, tragedy?—And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, contentedness and cheerfulness of the theoretical man—indeed? might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of anarchically disintegrating instincts? And the ‘Hellenic cheerfulness’ of the later Hellenism merely a glowing sunset? The Epicurean will counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the sufferer?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy ([1886 preface:] An Attempt at Self-Criticism. §1)

“It is as an individualist that I wish to defend the cause of organization! It is impossible to demand that anarchism cannot allow organization by reason of its principles. Not even the most dyed-in-the-wool individualist condemns the association of individuals outright.

Saying, as sometimes is said, either Stirner or Kropotkin, thereby opposing these two thinkers, is wrong. Kropotkin and Stirner cannot be opposed against each other: they expounded the same idea from different points of view. That is all. And the proof that Max Stirner was not the crazed individualist that he is made out to be is that he pronounced himself in favour of “organization”. He even dedicated a whole chapter to the association of egoists.

As our organization has no executive power it will not run contrary to our principles. In the workers’ unions we defend the economic interests of the workers. As for the rest, we must be a distinct group and create organizations on a libertarian basis.”


— Karel Vohryzek,
Speech delivered at the second International Anarchist Congress (1907)

Leftist anti-intellectualism

Importance of philosophy/theory

— Emma Goldman,
The Failure of Christianity

Relevance of Nietzsche's philosophy for revolutionary (anti-)politics

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Journals (1847)

Light Yagami's reactionary views on crime