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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.

— Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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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)

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.

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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.