Clergyman's

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 ‘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

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

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

Whereas Marx’s vision of homo faber becomes inoperative within social chains, Stirner’s man makes his own freedom.
- John Carroll

In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck.
- John Carroll

Nietzsche … combines, in effect, Christ’s harsh sayings: ‘let the dead bury their dead’ and ‘narrow is the way which leadeth unto life’.
- John Carroll

The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is … to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments.
- John Carroll

Dostoevsky’s underground man … observes his contemporaries striving to establish false goals where there are no naturally generated ones. … He argues they should be conscious and honest enough to recognize that the goal itself is not an absolute, and probably not even important. A strong attachment to the telos indicates that the spontaneous enjoyment the child once took in road-building has waned.
- John Carroll