Max Stirner Quotes

The life of labor does not make men, but drudges.

Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

You cannot afford a world with slavery, which literally takes someone and turns them into a machine.

I protest against the fitness and truth of the usually received definitions and applications of "slave labor" and "free labor"--and, in contradiction thereto, maintain that, in proportion to the respective populations, there are many more slaves in England, and in very much more suffering and painful conditions, than in all the negro slaveholding States of this Confederation.

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep, And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.

Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

That state is a state of slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him.

If you have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is to convince yourself that the person is subhuman. And won't mind the enslavement. The second thing you must do is convince your allies that the person is subhuman so that you have some support. But the third and the unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he, she, is not quite a first class citizen.

Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.

Enslavement is when one person completely controls another person, uses violence or violent threats to maintain that control, exploits them economically, and pays them effectively nothing. Trafficking in persons is a process of enslaving someone.

As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. - The Society of The Spectacle

I thought that, given the system of rewards central to our economic system, in which profit maximization is valued above all else and specifically above life, it is probably just as irresistible to the owners of capital (human or otherwise) to exploit workers (and the land): "Nothing personal," they say as they load their property onto the ship bound for the Middle Passage, "but a man's gotta turn a dime."

We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.

How many people worldwide are victims of this type of slavery, in which the person is at the service of his or her work, while work should offer a service to people so they may have dignity. I ask my brothers and sisters in faith and all men and women of good will for a decisive choice to combat trafficking in persons, which includes "slave labor."

That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

Slavery is the ultimate and greatest evil. For it is based on a denial of the dignity of the human soul.

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

Whether our feet are compressed in iron shoes, our faces hidden with veils and masks; whether yoked with cows to draw the plow through its furrows, or classed with idiots, lunatics and criminals in the laws and constitutions of the State, the principle is the same; for the humiliations of the spirit are as real as the visible badges of servitude.

Lincoln sees slavery in some ways as a theft of labor. A slave is a laborer who is being denied the fruits of his labor.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!