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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.