That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
All the world's not a stage.
Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
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