Among today’s adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.
In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification.
The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning.
The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.
I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.
I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.
Nowadays most people kick with the pricks.
Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
The late Franz Borkenau once said, after he had broken with the Communist Party, that he could no longer put up with the practice of discussing municipal regulations in the categories of Hegelian logic, and Hegelian logic in the spirit of meetings of the town council.
Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.
The subjectivist approach to art simply fails to understand that the subjective experience of art in itself is meaningless, and that in order to grasp the importance of art one has to zero in on the artistic object rather than on the fun of the art lover.
The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.
Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.
In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object.
In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
Folly is truth in the form which men are struck with as amid untruth they will not let truth go.
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.
The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.
Ever since Plato, bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objective antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out mean always conceals the antinomy and is torn apart by it.