Max Stirner Quotes

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

A functioning police state needs no police.

I'm tired of living in a police state.

The state must not ... let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called "freedom of the press," ... it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state.

Nothing more threatens Vladimir Putin than not being able to track his own citizens.

It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.

If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never intrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.

The State has but one face for me: that of the police. To my eyes, all of the State's ministries have this single face, and I cannot imagine the ministry of culture other than as the police of culture, with its prefect and commissioners.

Socialism and interventionism. Both have in common the goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state.

[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you're going to have a police State.

Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police.

When only cops have guns, it's called a "police state".

The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.

Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment.

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Routine is a declivity down which many governments slide, and routine says that freedom of the press is dangerous.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

I mean, I really don't want the federal government to be determining whether or not a person who feels certain ways about the environment or about animals or about certain religious issues should be considered an extremist. That to me is a type of thought control, mind control, which is very dangerous.

Every time the government grows we lose more of who we are.

You talked about national identity cards and the terrorism bill. We have made a government that has grown used to viewing us as subjects, has grown used to seeing its role as commanding us.