Horkheimer Quotes

#1. Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.

Thomas Metzinger

#2. 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.

Max Horkheimer

#3. The Night Sky is not just another planisphere. I think The Night Sky is the finest and easiest to use star finding aid in existence.

Jack Horkheimer

#4. On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

Margaret Drabble

#5. Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

Max Horkheimer

#6. The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.

Max Horkheimer

#7. 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.

Max Horkheimer

#8. 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.

Max Horkheimer

#9. Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

Max Horkheimer

#10. Oil prices jumped to well over $100 a barrel, and analysts say it's due to tension in the Middle East. So, luckily, it's just a temporary thing.

Jay Leno

#11. Every moment gives birth to the next moment and influences it. Getting out of that chain of perpetual being is getting off the wheel of birth and death. That is enlightenment.

Frederick Lenz

#12. 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.

Max Horkheimer

#13. The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.

Max Horkheimer

#14. 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.

Max Horkheimer

#15. Keep Looking Up was my life's admonition
I can do little else in my present position.

Jack Horkheimer

#16. Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism,

Max Horkheimer

#17. The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies ... Subjective reason conforms to anything.

Max Horkheimer

#18. Plato and his objectivistic successors ... preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.

Max Horkheimer

#19. The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflicy between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.

Max Horkheimer

#20. The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

Max Horkheimer

#21. We need to make some real fundamental change from the Constitution down in this country.

Al Sharpton

#22. A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.

Max Horkheimer

#23. Life is a daring adventure.I am enjoying every bit of the joyful journey.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#24. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.

Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer

#25. Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and meditate.

Max Horkheimer

#26. Never took an easy path if he thought it was the wrong one. Never stepped back from a fight if he thought it had to be done.

Joe Abercrombie

#27. The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up ... Psychologically, the father is ... replaced by the world of things.

Max Horkheimer

#28. People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,

William Zinsser

#29. Philosophy is overwhelmingly complicated, its procedure depressingly slow.

Max Horkheimer