Ernst Junger Quotes

The Ego is partly free. partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free: God.

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.

When my body is covered and disappears, it's not about the relationship between me and the wall, but the relationship between me as an individual and those slogans which are used to fool the public.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

You don't have freedom because you are a hyphenated American; you have freedom because you are an individual, and that should be protected.

The communitarians may say you've been enjoying too much individual freedom, and that you must give up some of that for the benefit of the community. But they really mean that they want more power over your life - to force you to subsidize, obey and conform to their choices.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

I believe in small governments or no governments. I think the majority of people want to have big government, a big brother taking care of them.

I would support a mass civil disobedience where we take medicine to tell the state that they have absolutely no right to control our consciousness and to define our spiritual practice.

Our democratic culture does not prioritise protecting an individual's right to live life her way, especially if that is not our way or the way of the community.

Voluntaryism is the idea that all human interactions should be free of coercion, based on individual self-ownership. This is in contrast to socialism, which is based on coercion justified by collective ownership.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.

In his essay 'Self-Reliance' Emerson wrote, 'Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.' The Apostle Paul reminds us that whoso would be a Christian must also be a a nonconformist. Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.

But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

True freedom is always spiritual. It has something to do with your innermost being, which cannot be chained, handcuffed, or put into a jail.

Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way.

The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.

This whole society, up to now, has been very violent with the individual. It does not believe in the individual; it is against the individual. It tries in every possible way to destroy you for its own purposes. It needs clerks, it needs stationmasters, deputy-collectors, policemen, magistrates, it needs soldiers. It does not need human beings.

Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.

Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

Free agency is a gift of God....The world does not comprehend the significance of that divine gift to the individual. It is as inherent as intelligence which, we are told, has never been nor can be created

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

I wrote about why I didn't think libertarians are really doing this kind of thing so that they can have sex with dogs. I discussed some of the reasons that a person might want to live out of the control of our federal, state, local, and every other form of government. Actually, I don't think I even called myself a libertarian. I think Tom Shroder identified me as one.