Max Horkheimer Quotes

“Enthusiasm is bad. Calm and resolution constitute the strength of virtue.”

“It is precisely the dominating spirit of nature that continually claims the superiority of nature in the competition.”

“The Enlightenment relates to things like the dictator to men. He grants them to the extent that he can manipulate them.”

“The Enlightenment, however, recognized the old powers in the Platonic and Aristotelian inheritance of metaphysics and pursued the truth claim of the universals as a superstition. In the authority of general concepts she thinks she can still see the fear of demons, through whose images people in magical rituals sought to influence nature. From now on, matter should finally be mastered without the illusion of ruling or inherent forces, hidden properties.

What does not want to conform to the measure of predictability and usefulness is considered suspicious by the Enlightenment. Once it is allowed to unfold undisturbed by external oppression, there is no stopping it. Their own ideas of human rights fare no differently than the older universals. Any spiritual resistance it encounters only increases its strength.

This is due to the fact that enlightenment still recognizes itself in myths. Whatever myths the resistance may invoke, simply because they become arguments in such opposition, they profess the principle of corrosive rationality, which they accuse the Enlightenment of. Enlightenment is totalitarian.”

“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.”

“There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence.”