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 CarrollThe primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.
John CarrollStirner'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 CarrollFor 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 CarrollLife 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