# “Stealing is good.” https://minguhongmfg.com/en/products/stealing-is-good Date: 2025-06-18 ## “The history of creation is the history of stealing.” From ancient imitation to AI prompts, the boldest and most cheerful defense of stealing *“Stealing is good.”* reexamines “stealing” in creative work not as an ethical taboo or legal category, but as a technique and philosophy of creation across periods and genres. From Plato and Cicero through Shakespeare, Warhol, and Tarantino to today’s algorithm-based AI, Min Guhong dissects the “art of stealing” through extensive historical examples and artistic precedents. Rather than defending plagiarism, the book persuasively proposes that creation has ultimately been a repeated experiment in answering the question “What did you steal, and how?” The first chapter begins with the declaration “Stealing is bad,” making clear that the book is no simple defense. The author writes that “stealing destroys someone else’s context, evades one’s own responsibility, and blocks the journey toward finding one’s own words,” while signaling that this criticism will lead to a paradoxical “praise of stealing.” Instead of concealing or denying stealing, the book faces and dissects it, exploring its ethics and aesthetics together. From rhetorical education in ancient Greece and Rome, biblical commentary in medieval monasteries, Renaissance painters’ imitation of the classics, and Romantic writers’ secret plagiarism, through the overt quotation and repetition of modernism and Pop Art, to twenty-first-century platform-based creation and AI tools, each part of “The History of Stealing” reads as both cultural history and a theory of creation. Shakespeare, for example, borrowed the plots of almost all his plays, yet overturned them completely with sentences such as “To be or not to be.” Warhol transformed repetition itself into an aesthetic with the declaration “Just do exactly what someone else has done well. Exactly the same, and more of it.” Through all these examples, the author asks not about the act of stealing, but how one made a voice of one’s own from it. The middle of the book dismantles common assumptions about stealing and sharply outlines its ethical boundaries and aesthetic techniques. Addressing thirteen recurring misconceptions one by one—“It isn’t stealing if you change the shell,” “It’s mine if I hide the source,” “Imitation is shameful”—the author emphasizes that stealing can happen without copying, and that revealing the lineage of one’s admiration is the attitude of an honest creator. Here, he argues that creative ethics lie less in “What did you take, and from where?” than in “How did you rewrite it?” and “Whose inspiration did you revive, and how?” Beginning with “The Spirit of Stealing,” the latter part of the book reads like a practical manual for creation. Before it is a technique, the author says, stealing is a “sense of admiration”: training oneself to perceive another’s sentences precisely, an attitude of reflecting on the ethics of quotation, and an emotional intuition that restores relationships. Here, stealing becomes not merely borrowing but a way creation begins, a training of the senses that connects times and beings. The conclusion that “stealing is a language of relationships, an honest confession, and another painfully candid name for creation” makes clear that this is not just a theory of creation, but a diagnosis of the sensibility of an age. At the same time, *“Stealing is good.”* is not merely theoretical. Through a philosophy of stealing, it revisits the creator’s perception, responsibility, and ethics. Asking not “Did you steal?” but “What did you make with what you stole?” and “Whom did you bring back to life?”, it encourages readers to reflect on their own creation. The author, Min Guhong, moves between publishing, design, and education with writing and the web at their center. Running the one-person parasitic company Min Guhong Manufacturing, he has experimented with “a sensory infrastructure for creation.” This book is another gathering of the texts, lectures, and practices he has accumulated over some five years in [New Order](https://neworder.xyz), which calls itself “liberal arts classes for modern people,” as well as a new proposal for a “practical theory of stealing.” --- ## Contents - Stealing Is Bad - The History of Stealing - Thirteen Misconceptions About Stealing - Thirteen Mindsets for Stealing - Thirteen Techniques for Stealing - Bookmarks for Stealing - A Stealing Workshop - Thirteen Sayings for Stealing - Is Stealing Bad? --- “This book opens ambitiously, exposing the cunning theft and shameless self-justification concealed behind the sublime veil of creation as if discovering them for the first time. Yet, in my limited experience, its contents go no further than reheating old practices already familiarly packaged in the art world with pedantic terms such as ‘homage’ and ‘appropriation.’ The long history of stealing and secret-manual-like techniques that Mr. Min Guhong enthusiastically expounds as if he were Columbus amount to little more than an ordinary introductory book on creation, seasoned with his characteristic cynicism and narcissism and supplied with footnotes. Whether this lengthy, tenacious aesthetics of stealing is a product of pure intellectual inquiry or a sophisticated sales tactic that deftly exploits the anxieties of modern people groaning under the heavy yoke of originality is best judged by the keen eye of the reader who picks up this dangerous book of wisdom. Though, of course, that judgment itself may be part of another intellectual game the book has cunningly designed.” - [https://thebooksociety.org](https://thebooksociety.org) - [cover.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/c890ee55cd-1791639121/cover.png) - [cover2.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/a67b43cd86-1791639121/cover2.png) - [cover3.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/7737f8fa19-1791639121/cover3.png) - [cover4.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/fdd201a649-1791639122/cover4.png) - [inside.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/8184753dd3-1791639122/inside.png) - [inside2.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/eae098c122-1791639123/inside2.png) - [inside3.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/13fd07c14e-1791639124/inside3.png) - [inside6.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/8ac31e53ce-1791639124/inside6.png) - [inside25.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/f54ccb64c1-1791639124/inside25.png) - [inside30.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/0f999abc61-1791639125/inside30.png) - [inside41.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/c6b53fb8a3-1791639126/inside41.png) - [inside47.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/49dcb24c05-1791639126/inside47.png) - [inside51.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/49cad7ee8e-1791639126/inside51.png) - [inside57.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/b3e6b8a124-1791639127/inside57.png) - [inside60.png](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/stealing-is-good/786366ff1d-1791639127/inside60.png) Tags: QR, The Book Society, Mediabus, Lim Kyungyong, Bob Gill