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people everywhere are trying not to feel. Cool, cool, cool, that's the word. That's the banner. From America first, but now us. I think of the groups of young people, political and social around London [...] the new socialists--that's what they have in common, a quality of measured emotion, coolness. In a world as terrible as this, limit emotion.

The decision as to whether we should torment him or perhaps spare him depends entirely on our need for the one or the other. On our inner reasons.

Riches cannot be the source of nobility, since they are base by their very nature; this baseness makes them contrary to nobility. Baseness here is equivalent to “the cause of imperfection”; this makes baseness the opposite of nobility,

He suggested I should do a play based on [my novel]. A play which should take no sides but emphasize the essential tragedy of the colonial situation the tragedy of the whites. It is true, of course, what is poverty, what are hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, the pedestrian degradations (his word [...]) compared to the reality, the human reality of the white dilemma?

just as the efficient cause of true friendship is virtue, so the efficient cause of philosophy is truth; and just as the goal of true friendship is worthy pleasure, which issues from living together according to what is specifically human, that is, according to reason (as Aristotle clearly holds), so the goal of philosophy is that most excellent pleasure which does not suffer from any interruption or flaw

This may be seen as an indication of the extent to which both Horkheimer and Adorno had assimilated the theological basis for the critique of progress and of conservative positions which lay behind the categories of release, uselessness and self-abandonment.

now that [...] the soul has been touched on I shall make a digression to discuss it, for a discussion of this will be a happy way to say a final word on that one who lives in blessedness, Beatrice, of whom it is my express intention not to speak further in this book. I declare that of all brutish opinions none is more stupid, more base or more pernicious than the belief that there is no other life after this.

he knelt to pick them up and, raising his head, saw her parted knees under her skirt and her thighs in lace underwear. Till then he had never seen what a woman wore under her skirts, and this sudden vision made his mouth dry and caused him to tremble almost uncontrollably. A mystery was being revealed to him that, despite his many experiences, he would never resolve.

But, at nine, he could not disobey his grandmother, nor would he know how.

Adorno was thus exposing himself to Lazarsfeld’s criticism that, by treating the explication of all the logical possibilities of a problem as superfluous, he was allowing himself to maintain his own prejudices. The fact that many people whistle distorted forms of tunes they are familiar with was, for Adorno, equivalent to children mistreating their pet dogs.

Here Marxist analysis has hit on a cleverer answer: experiment failed to develop because there was no serious technology; there was no serious technology because human labour was cheap; human labour was cheap because slaves were abundant. Thus by a neat chain of inference the rise of the mediaeval world-view is shown to depend on the institution of slavery.

religious growth is geological: its principle is, on the whole and with exceptions, agglomeration, not substitution. A new belief-pattern very seldom effaces completely the pattern that was there before: either the old lives on as an element in the new—sometimes an unconfessed and half-unconscious element—or else the two persist side by side, logically incompatible, but contemporaneously accepted

In our century it was 1917 in Russia. And in China. Then the well runs dry, because, as you say, the cruelty and the ugliness are too strong. Then the well fills slowly again. And then there's another painful lurch forward. [...] because every time the dream gets stronger. If people can imagine something, there'll come a time when they'll achieve it. [...] goodness. Kindness. The end of being animals.

religion and morals were not initially interdependent, in Greece or elsewhere; they had their separate roots. […] religion grows out of man's relationship to his total environment, morals out of his relation to his fellowmen. But sooner or later in most cultures there comes a time of suffering when most people refuse to be content with Achilles' view, the view that "God's in his Heaven, all's wrong with the world."

What Horkheimer stated here was said on the basis of his knowledge of the ‘dark’ writers of the bourgeois period, whom he thought so much of, and it was more or less independent of any particular scientific research.

Everything was divided into three,
and each of us received his share of honor.
The lots were shaken out and I was granted
the salt sea as my domain forever,
and Hades got the misty world of darkness,
and Zeus the spacious sky amid the clouds,
up in the air. But all of us still share
the earth and Mount Olympus.

Adorno approached Kierkegaard’s work in his Habilitation thesis in the same way that Benjamin had approached Goethe’s Elective Affinities'. with a destructive critical attitude which attempted to preserve what could be saved.

‘Great father Zeus, will any mortals bother
to tell their plans and schemes to deathless gods
in any place across the boundless world?
Do you not see? The Greeks have built a wall
around their ships to keep them safe from harm,
and dug a trench along this wall—and yet
they have not given any hecatombs
to us—the gods! The glory of this work
will spread in fame as far as dawn extends […]’

Now tell me, Muses,
who have your houses high on Mount Olympus,
for you are goddesses and you are here,
and you know everything, you see it all,
while we can only listen to the stories—
we have seen nothing and we do not know.

The bassets were pure and noble. They waited their turns with him one by one; it was a ritual, their excited barking in anticipation; then, after martinis, he had sex with the four bitches. His basset stud was a good sport. The bitches were receptive to the dog only twice a year, but they had been trained to accept their master from behind anytime.

“Have you asked what kind of government they have?”“Yes, but we didn’t understand the answer very well,” he said.“An oligarchy with some democratic features, but not much control,” Arete said, as she scraped her bowl.I tried to imagine that and couldn’t.

Why did I never tell Sokrates how much I loved and appreciated him?

Greek is the language of my soul. Greek has philosophical clarity. But English is stored in my memory. It is a command language.

And when the two sums of money I was looking for finally appeared in their adjacent windows all I did was sit and stare at them for a long time. In the comparison, as it turned out, [she] came out a little ahead. And just like that the GDP of an entire country could fit into a single person, like one Russian doll into another.

“They have social classes,” I said.
“Yes,” Ficino agreed.
“And money. And wealth and poverty.”
“They started with adults who knew those things,” [he] said. “That must have made it difficult.”
“Are they pursuing excellence?” I asked.

At that time Delos floated on the water, but afterward it was attached to the sea-bed like other lands—or this is the story recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo. (Father says it’s poetically true, whatever that means.)

Here's one of life's little mysteries: aristocratic bloodlines seemed genetically incompatible with physical beauty. [He] would be the first to admit the rich were ugly; only great fortunes had made it possible for ugly blue bloods to continue reproducing themselves. [He] knew that [they] only stayed as long as there was dope and money.

I feel pretty good. I know what they came for, and I know they left without it. Which means I'm still at large, still slippery.

Whether or not this was a privilege of living above the fray in a grand hotel, as Lukács famously sneered, or an attitude that allowed Adorno to fill his mind with ever new and increasing awe and admiration for the stars the more frequently and continuously he reflected on them is, to paraphrase Kant’s famous conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason, not for us to decide now.

Whether or not this was a privilege of living above the fray in a grand hotel, as Lukács famously sneered, or an attitude that allowed Adorno to fill his mind with ever new and increasing awe and admiration for the stars the more frequently and continuously he reflected on them is, to paraphrase Kant’s famous conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason, not for us to decide now.