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Society has lost its memory, and with it, its mind. The inability or refusal to think back takes its toll in the inability to think.

— Russell Jacoby Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

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More quotes by Russell Jacoby

Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The sundering of a scientific from a poetic truth is the primal mark of the administrative mind.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The child ego, once nurtured and scarred by the family is no longer nurtured but simply integrated.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

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In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

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