"If the press is _my own_, I as little need a permission of the State for employing it as I seek that permission in order to blow my nose. The press is my _property_ from the moment when nothing is more to me than myself; for from this moment State, Church, people, society, and the like, cease, because they have to thank for their existence only the disrespect that I have for myself, and with the vanishing of this undervaluation they themselves are extinguished: they exist only when they exist _above me_, exist only as _powers and power-holders_. Or can you imagine a State whose citizens one and all think nothing of it? it would be as certainly a dream, an existence in seeming, as 'united Germany.' "The press is my own as soon as I myself am my own, a self-owned man: to the egoist belongs the world, because he belongs to no power of the world. "With this my press might still be very _unfree_, as _e. g._, at this moment. But the world is large, and one helps himself as well as he can. If I were willing to abate from the _property_ of my press, I could easily attain the point where I might everywhere have as much printed as my fingers produced. But, as I want to assert my property, I must necessarily swindle my enemies. 'Would you not accept their permission if it were given you?' Certainly, with joy; for their permission would be to me a proof that I had fooled them and started them on the road to ruin. I am not concerned for their permission, but so much the more for their folly and their overthrow. I do not sue for their permission as if I flattered myself (like the political liberals) that we both, they and I, could make out peaceably alongside and with each other, yes, probably raise and prop each other; but I sue for it in order to make them bleed to death by it, that the permitters themselves may cease at last. I act as a conscious enemy, overreaching them and _utilizing_ their heedlessness. "The press is _mine_ when I recognize outside myself no _judge_ whatever over its utilization, _i. e._ when my writing is no longer determined by morality or religion or respect for the State laws or the like, but by me and my egoism!"-- Now, what have you to reply to him who gives you so impudent an answer?--We shall perhaps put the question most strikingly by phrasing it as follows: Whose is the press, the people's (State's) or mine? The politicals on their side intend nothing further than to liberate the press from personal and arbitrary interferences of the possessors of power, without thinking of the point that to be really open for everybody it would also have to be free from the laws, _i. e._ from the people's (State's) will. They want to make a "people's affair" of it.