Quotes | Stirner

“When the world gets in my way—and it gets in my way everywhere—then I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. You are nothing for me but—my food, just as I am also fed upon and consumed by you. We have only one relationship to each other, that of usefulness, usability, advantage. We owe each other nothing, because what I seem to owe to you, I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheerful expression in order to likewise cheer you up, then your cheerfulness matters to me, and my expression serves my wish; I do not show it to thousands of others, whom I have no intention of cheering up.”

–from The Unique and Its Property by Max Stirner, as translated by Apio Ludd

“Who does the liberal regard as his equals? Human beings! If you are only a human being—and that you certainly are—the liberal calls you his brother. He asks very little about your private opinions and your private follies, if he can just see the “human being” in you.
But since he takes little notice of what you are privatim, indeed, lays no value on it in strict observance of his principle, he only sees in you what you are generatim. In other words, he sees in you not you, but the species, not Hans or Kunz, but the human being, not the actual or unique one, but your essence or concept, not the embodied individual but the spirit.
As Hans you would not be his equal, because he is Kunz and therefore not Hans; as a human being you are the same thing that he is. And since as Hans you do not exist for him, insofar as he is a liberal and not unconsciously an egoist, he has really made “brotherly love” very easy for himself: he doesn’t love the Hans in you, of whom he neither knows nor wants to know anything, but rather the human being.
To see nothing more in you and me than “human beings” is to carry on the Christian point of view, according to which one is for the other nothing but a concept (e.g., one appointed to salvation, etc.), to extremes.”

–from The Unique and Its Property by Max Stirner, as translated by Apio Ludd