John Carroll Quotes

#1. Politics and the affairs of State are dissociated from the orbit of the individual, and in so far as they cannot be repossessed as his living private property they must be rendered impotent.

John Carroll

#2. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.

John Carroll

#3. Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful.

John Carroll

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

John Carroll

#5. 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.

John Carroll

#6. 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.

John Carroll

#7. But not only is the Shema the fountainhead and bedrock of all oneness theology, it is also the fountainhead and bedrock of all theology.

John Carroll

#8. The original of morals lies with the thought that 'the community is more valuable than the individual' (Menschliches 2.1.89

John Carroll

#9. For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.

John Carroll

#10. Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.

John Carroll

#11. 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.

John Carroll

#12. In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck.

John Carroll

#13. The worst misstep one can make in design is to solve the wrong problem.

John Carroll

#14. The ugliness of the ideological lies in its legitimating the pursuit of the trivial.

John Carroll

#15. Man at his best is a system-breaker, an iconoclast seeking not only variety, but destruction.

John Carroll

#16. Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.

John Carroll

#17. 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.

John Carroll

#18. Unlike Hegel's progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.

John Carroll

#19. The enemies of Christ ... could not bear his independence; his "Give the emperor that which is the emperor's" showed a contempt for the affairs of state and its politics for the moral order that their self-respect would not let them tolerate.

John Carroll

#20. The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions.

John Carroll

#21. A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.

John Carroll

#22. 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.

John Carroll

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

John Carroll

#24. There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.

John Carroll

#25. For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests.

John Carroll

#26. The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.

John Carroll

#27. Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts 'from above'.

John Carroll

#28. Nietzsche ... combines, in effect, Christ's harsh sayings: 'let the dead bury their dead' and 'narrow is the way which leadeth unto life'.

John Carroll