Great Throughts Treasury

"In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact."

"In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations."

"In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew."

"In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects."

"In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes."

"In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence."

"In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them."

"In the fanatical love of cars the feeling of physical homelessness plays a part. It is at the bottom of what the bourgeois were wont to call, mistakenly, the flight from oneself, from the inner void. Anyone who wants to move with the times is not allowed to be different. Psychological emptiness is itself only the result of the wrong kind of social absorption. The boredom that people are running away from merely mirrors the process of running away, that started long before."

"In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison."

"In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so."

"Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy."

"In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream."

"Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction."

"Intelligence is a moral category."

"It is not man's lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity."

"It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies."

"It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads."

"Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness."

"Legitimate works of art are today without exception socially undesired."

"Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture."

"Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion."

"Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralyzed intervals."

"Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no-one can say whether he died or escaped, survives."

"Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar."

"Metaphysical categories are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about, and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences."

"Life has become the ideology of its own absence."

"Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength."

"Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness."

"Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element."

"No emancipation without that of society."

"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category."

"None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace."

"No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit."

"Normality is death."

"Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology."

"Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid."

"Not only is the self-entwined in society it owes society its existence in the most literal sense."

"Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth."

"Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people."

"People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress. -"

"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."

"Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars."

"People know what they want because they know what other people want."

"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."

"Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself."

"Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness."

"Rampant technology eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment."

"Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience."

"Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs. Once people ran from dangers that were too desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror. Traffic regulations no longer need allow for wild animals, but they have not pacified running. It estranges us from bourgeois walking. The truth becomes visible that something is amiss with security, that the unleashed powers of life, be they mere vehicles, have to be escaped. The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century."

"Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them."