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Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws—this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. … Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

— Max Horkheimer The End of Reason (1941)

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Atheism

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.

All Max Horkheimer quotes →

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Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification.

Simone Weil

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

Simone Weil Last Notebook (1942)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

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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.