67 quotes
When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.
The End of Reason (1941)
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.
Power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason which informs reality.
The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.
Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)
The distrust which peasants and children display for glib persons has always preserved the notion of that injustice which made language the servant of gain.
When the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.
As solid citizens, philosophers ally themselves in practice with the powers they condemn in theory.
The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is ‘metaphysical’ and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)
The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.
The Latest Attack on Metaphysics (1937)
With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. … Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.
The End of Reason (1941)
In the world of exchange the one who gives more is in the wrong; but the one who loves is always the one who loves more.
Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)
The fruitfulness of knowledge indeed plays a role in its claim to truth, but the fruitfulness in question is to be understood as intrinsic to the science and not as usefulness for ulterior purposes.
Every human way of acting which hides the true nature of society ... is ideological.
It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule—in short, made part and parcel of production.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)
The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals.