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 CarrollThis will of Stirner's, this restless probing of all given knowledge, this endless questioning, and the continuous bending towards new understanding.
John CarrollStirner 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 CarrollAny 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 CarrollUtilitarianism 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