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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.

‘If rhetoric could harm it then it isn’t the Just City and it deserves it,’ she said.

Sokrates beamed at her like a proud father[.]

The white man had sprinkled holy water and had prayed for almost five hundred years in the Americas, and still the Christian God was absent. Now [he] understood why European philosophers had told their people God was dead: the white man’s god had died about the time the Europeans had started sailing around the world.

We were not encouraged to have erotic feelings towards the other children—indeed, the opposite, we were discouraged from ever thinking about sex or romantic love. Friendships were encouraged, and friendship was always held out to us as the highest and best of human relationships.

Herein lies the origins of Antonin Scalia’s originalism. Faced with an activist, liberal Supreme Court, conservatives considered their very limited options. Social conservatives couldn’t get a right to life amendment through Congress. Fiscal conservatives couldn’t get a balanced budget amendment through the House. Social and fiscal conservatives disagreed about holding a constitutional convention.

The Old South was one thing. The Middle Ages were another.

‘Isn’t it excruciating?’ [she] said. ‘They pile shit upon shit. It becomes an art form of its own. A pyramid of shit. An Uffizi Gallery of shit. The Museum of Modern Shit. Astonishing that we need these shit sabbaticals in order to become viable again.’

[His] strategy had always been better because it had broader application. It didn't succeed in overturning Brown, but [the originalist] argument, which was to present a single mode of constitutional interpretation as the only legitimate mode, had the important benefit of equipping opponents of the Warren Court's many other landmark decisions with an argument that could be against nearly all of them.

I was feeling practically drugged from all that French.

Progressives were in a pickle. To implement a federal income tax, they needed a constitutional amendment. To get a constitutional amendment, they had to get it through the Senate. To get an income tax amendment through the Senate, they needed a more accountable Senate. To get a more accountable Senate, they needed a constitutional amendment. They went back to the drawing board.

With a sick man, you don’t split hairs. You give a sick man the benefit of the doubt. He needs that leeway or he’s liable to crack. You don’t use logic or common sense on a sick man. There’s only one way to treat him—like a child. You let him have his way every time.

Looking back, the 1860s and '70s appear to have been as much a tragedy as a triumph, the sotry of three amendments that passed and yet somehow failed, too. Even the trial of Jefferson Davis was a chance for a kind of justice that never came.

This is the second straight chapter that ends with sex and intimate lighting. […] Not that there isn’t something right about a chapter that ends with sex. There is something right. Sex is the thing that nothing can follow. It asks for blank space. We wish for a silence that will last at least for the turning of a page.

Even ghosts disappear towards morning, but K. had remained there, hands in pockets, as if expecting that, since he did not go away, the whole passage with all the rooms and gentlemen would go away.

One of the most illuminating remarks Story ever made about the Constitution, one that casts light, too, on his rules for interpreting it, came when he said, ‘I once saw a book advertised, entitled, New Views on the Constitution. I was startled! What right has a man to start new views upon it?’