Skip to content

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 Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)

Another quote →

More quotes by John Carroll

A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.

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.

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’.

Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)

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

Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)

Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative—the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.

Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)

All John Carroll quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Carroll (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.