Frankfurt School Quotes

“Political correctness is a war on noticing.”
― Steve Sailer

“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, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“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

“The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete life to a
universe of speculation.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Nuestra misión actual es, antes bien, asegurar que en el futuro no vuelva a perderse la capacidad para la teoría y para la acción que nace de esta [...] Debemos luchar para que la humanidad no quede desmoralizada para siempre por los terribles acontecimientos del presente, para que la fe en un futuro feliz de la sociedad, en un futuro de paz y digno del hombre, no desaparezca de la tierra.”
― Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays

“كيف يمكننا إطلاقا أن نقول أمرا عن الشيء من دون أن نكون مطلعين بشكل كاف على نوع الحقيقة التي تخصه؟ يمكن حالا أن نرد على ذالك بسؤال: كيف يمكننا أن نعرف أمرا ما عن الحقيقة الحقة حول الشيء إذا لم نعرف الشيء ذاته، حتى نحسم في شأن الحقيقة التي يمكن و يجب أن تخصه؟”
― Martin Heidegger, السؤال عن الشيء: حول نظرية المبادئ الترنسندنتالية عند كنت

“Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.”
― Theodor Adorno et al

“To illustrate this claim, Benjamin relates a fable about a father who taught his sons the merits of hard work by fooling them into thinking that there was buried treasure in the vineyard by the house. The turning of soil in the vain search for gold results in the discovery of a real treasure: a wonderful crop of fruit.

With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’ that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness

“The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Frankfurt School Critical Theory is generally understood as a body of social thought both emerging from and responding to Marxism, and the work of critical theorists is recognized as having made significant contributions to the study of [culture] … Emphasizing issues of consciousness and culture, the critical theorists have … stressed the role of human agency in affecting revolutionary social change. … Theory with practical intent seeks not only to understand the world but also to transform it.”
― Joan Alway, Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas

“Die Aufklärung aber erkannte im platonischen und aristotelischen Erbteil der Metaphysik die alten Mächte wieder und verfolgte den Wahrheitsanspruch der Universalien als Superstition. In der Autorität der allgemeinen Begriffe meint sie noch die Furcht vor den Dämonen zu erblicken, durch deren Abbilder die Menschen im magischen Ritual die Natur zu beeinflussen suchten. Von nun an soll die Materie endlich ohne Illusion waltender oder innewohnender Kräfte, verborgeneer Eigenschaften beherrscht werden. Was dem Maß von Berechenbarkeit und Nützlichkeit sich nicht fügen will, gilt der Aufklärung für verdächtig. Darf sie sich einmal ungestört von auswendiger Unterdrückung entfalten, so ist kein Halten mehr. Ihren eigenen Ideen von Menschenrecht ergeht es dabei nicht anders als den älteren Universalien. An jedem geistigen Widerstand, den sie findet, vermehrt sich bloß ihre Stärke. Das rührt daher, daß Aufklärung auch in den Mythen noch sich selbst wiedererkennt. Auf welche Mythen der Widerstand sich immer berufen mag, schon dadurch, dass sie in solchem Gegensatz zu Argumenten werden, bekennen sie sich zum Prinzip der zersetzenden Rationalität, das sie der Aufklärung vorwerfen. Aufklärung ist totalitär.”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“The true history of mankind will be, in the strict sense, the history of free individuals, so that the interest of the whole will be woven into the individual existence of each.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory

“To hate destructiveness one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Ideen som samlet medlemmen av Frankfurterskolen, og som ga den nymarxistiske tradisjonen et distinkte preg, var at samfunnsanalyser per definisjon skal være kritiske, at de aldri må forsvare det bestående.”
― Andreas Hardhaug Olsen