Quotes About Society

To say "we" and mean "I" is one of the most recondite insults.

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness ... sub-language as superior language.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.

Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification.

Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen

The glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Ich fürchte nicht die Rückkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Faschisten, sondern die Rückkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Demokraten.

The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.

Der Verfall des Schenkens spiegelt sich in der peinlichen Erfindung der Geschenkartikel, die bereits darauf angelegt sind, daß man nicht weiß, was man schenken soll, weil man es eigentlich gar nicht will. Diese Waren sind beziehungslos wie ihre Käufer.

There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.

in the antagonistic society, the relationship of the generations is also one of competition, behind which stands naked violence.