Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That which is cannot be true.
Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.
This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.
Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.
The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.
Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason
One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art.
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.
The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.
Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.
The happy consciousness is shaky enough a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.
The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
The liberating force of technology the instrumentalization of things turns into ... the instrumentalization of man.
[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.
Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation.
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.
The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.
The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop.
Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.
Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.
If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.
In conditions of private property ... "life-activity" stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.
This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.
While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.
The world of immediate experience the world in which we find ourselves living must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.
The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
Coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.
In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.