John Carroll Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
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
The 'I think, therefore I am' of Descartes, the 'I feel, therefore I am' of late eighteenth century Romanticism, and the 'I possess therefore I am' of bourgeois man are dogmas, partial at that, incorporated to define a being that is incapable of defining itself.

John Carroll
The journalist believes that he or she works not for the shareholder primarily, but for the reader and for the public. I think journalists — good journalists — have always looked upon themselves as public servants.

John Carroll
Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal—the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. … Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.

John Carroll
The Inquisitor is the forgiving father, the scientific materialist, and the social engineer. He is the most compassionate, and honest, of politicians; he takes on great burdens of responsibility in order to protect his subjects from ethical doubt. But he also suppresses any attempt to expand their self-consciousness: he is the 'great simplifier', the shepherd to a flock of carefree children.

John Carroll
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.

John Carroll
Stirner's political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. … Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual's action. … The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.

John Carroll
By punishing the criminal the moral man hopes to dissuade the evil imprisoned in his own breast from escaping. Fear of self is projected in hatred of the immoral other.

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.

John Carroll
The original of morals lies with the thought that 'the community is more valuable than the individual' (Menschliches 2.1.89)

John Carroll
Any attempt to break with the past, or with existing social structures, is a failure if it leads to a bored, listless, and colourless style of life; assertive and enduring innovation, like the mastering of a new environment, requires the confidence and discipline which are founded on exuberant emotions.

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

John Carroll
Dostoevsky … impeaches Christ through the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor: 'it was pitiless of thee to value man so highly'. This Christ has no answer to the world of politics, of rational action, of knowledge. He is utterly Nietzschean in his intention not to pity, but to respect.

John Carroll
In marketing, the idea is to manage the number of complaints down to zero. That's fine if you're making toasters, but a newspaper that gets no complaints is a dead newspaper.

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

John Carroll
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
Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative—the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.

John Carroll
The priest who has lost the resilience of youth cannot be helped; his polymorphously playful and imaginative energies have been emasculated by a long conditioning to the ways of the old order; he would be liberated into a sea of undifferentiated boredom and anxiety. Only the man whose desires and passions are intact has a future.

John Carroll
There is a strong strain of Protestant masochism in this [Nietzsche's] assault on morality and ideology. … Framing this perspective is the Protest image of the utterly self-reliant, responsible individual.

John Carroll
I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times.

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

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

John Carroll
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
Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. … The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae.

John Carroll
Stirner … holds to a joy-principle rather than to a pleasure-principle.

John Carroll
R. W. K. Paterson makes a central point of identifying Stirner with nihilism. His argument depends on a failure to distinguish between social values, which Stirner does reject, and personal values, to which he is more overtly committed than any other philosopher.

John Carroll
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
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
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