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Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine. Enlightenment pushed aside the classical demand to “think thinking.” … . Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought.

— Max Horkheimer

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More quotes by Max Horkheimer

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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Max Horkheimer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.