Quotes from Max Horkheimer

Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete.

Philosophy is overwhelmingly complicated, its procedure depressingly slow.

The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.

Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and meditate.

A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.

Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.

He has nothing useful to say about fascism who is unwilling to mention capitalism.

Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

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.

Philosophy is overwhelmingly complicated, its procedure depressingly slow.

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.

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.

The task of critical reflection is not merely to understand the various facts in their historical development (...) but also to see through the notion of fact itself, in its development and therefore in its relativity.

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.

Es justamente el espíritu dominador de la naturaleza el que continuamente reivindica la superioridad de la naturaleza en la competencia

The very idea of truth has been reduced to the purpose of a useful tool in the control of nature, and the realization of the infinite potentialities inherent in man has been relegated to the status of a luxury. Thought that does not serve the interests of any established group or is not pertinent to the business of any industry has no place, is considered vain or superfluous.

los filósofos han concertado la paz con el mundo, mientras que en otro tiempo estar desunido con él pertenecía a la esencia de la filosofía. Schopenhauer y Nietzsche, desobedientes de la gran filosofía, anticiparon en sus vidas la nueva soledad del pensador.

La Ilustración se relaciona con las cosas como el dictador con los hombres. Éste los concede en la medida en en que puede manipularlos.