77 Quotes by John Carroll

Stirner and Nietzsche ... reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue.

The egoist ... destroys the universal importance accorded to moral law by showing that life independent of it is possible. Secondly, and even more intolerably to the pious, he manages to do so with shameless enjoyment.

[Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations.

The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.

Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a 'ruling thought'. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, ... for language itself is a network of 'fixed ideas'. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.

This will of Stirner's, this restless probing of all given knowledge, this endless questioning, and the continuous bending towards new understanding, ...

If man is to remain the creator and master of his world then, Stirner maintains, ... all that has been accepted, that has taken on the secure guise of the 'fact', must be return to a state of flux, or be rejected.

Nietzsche ... argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe ... who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil.

The garden [of Eden] is the realm of pure beauty from which man is expelled when he becomes interested in ethics, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The return into paradise, the homecoming, depends on him penetrating the veils of morality to glimpse again the lineaments of lost beauty.