John Carroll Quotes
1944
More John Carroll Quotes
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— p. 33 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 34 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 34 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 35 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The act of greatest subversion … is the one of indifference. A man, or a group, finds it unbearable that someone can be simply uninterested in his, or its, convictions. … There is a degree of complicity, or mutual respect, between the believer and the man who attacks his beliefs (the revolutionary), for the latter takes them seriously.
John Carroll— p. 53 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 53 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 54 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 55 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
… the bourgeois, who is not a real owner, but the servant of his avarice
John Carroll— p. 62 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The estranged ego projects its own disorder on to society and expects the restructuring and integration of the self writ large, the society, to reflect back on to the source of consciousness. Stirner regards this flight from self as a form of suicide, the dissolution of identity and uniqueness.
John Carroll— p. 79 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 85 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful.
John Carroll— p. 92 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The ugliness of the ideological lies in its legitimating the pursuit of the trivial.
John Carroll— p. 92 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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.
John Carroll— p. 93 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Nietzsche … criticizes Schopenhauerian aesthetics for not freeing itself from Kant’s moralistic: ‘that is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest’.
John Carroll— p. 95 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is … to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments.
John Carroll— p. 102 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.
John Carroll— p. 105 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 107 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 107 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
This will of Stirner’s, this restless probing of all given knowledge, this endless questioning, and the continuous bending towards new understanding, …
John Carroll— p. 107 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Nietzsche [claims] that the scientist is at best an instrument, a useful slave: he does not command or decide, he is not a whole man.
John Carroll— p. 111 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 149 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 152 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Man at his best is a system-breaker, an iconoclast seeking not only variety, but destruction.
John Carroll— p. 152 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 154 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)
A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.
John Carroll— John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)
Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help ] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.
John Carroll— John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 12
