Quotes About Society

What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society.

Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity.

Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

even there, where the rejection of the system is taken for granted and for that reason a lax and cunning conformism of its own has developed.

The undiminished irrationality of rational society encourages people to elevate religion into an end in itself, without regard to its content: to view religion as a mere attitude, as a quality of subjectivity. All this at the cost of religion itself. One needs only to be a believer—no matter what he believes in.

The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

They are official sinners but privately repentants. At the present stage of our society even the relation between sin and repentance may have undergone a fundamental change and may be the opposite of what it used to be formerly.

Una tale uguaglianza in cui scompaiono le differenze favorisce nascostamente la disuguaglianza.

Reduzidas a pura homenagem, as obras de arte pervertidas e corruptas são secretamente empurradas pelos beneficiados para o meio dos trastes, com os quais são assimiladas. Os consumidores podem se alegrar que haja tanta coisa para ver e ouvir. Praticamente pode-se ter tudo.

If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. He alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love.

As pessoas não percebem o quanto não são livres lá onde mais livres se sentem, porque a regra de tal ausência de liberdade foi abstraída delas.

Toda "cultura pura" tem causado mal-estar aos porta-vozes do poder

All these nervous people, from the unemployed to the public figure liable at any moment to incur the wrath of those whose investment he represents, believe that only by empathy, assiduity, serviceability, arts and dodges, by tradesmen's qualities, can they ingratiate themselves with the executive they imagine omnipresent, and soon there is no relationship that is not seen as a 'connection', no impulse not first censored as to whether it deviates from the acceptable.

Conceitos vulgares como "entretenimento" são muito mais adequados do que considerações pretensiosas sobre um fato de um escritor ser representante da pequena burguesia e outro, da alta burguesia.

Total purposelessness gives the lie to the totality of purposefulness in the world of domination, and only by virtue of this negation, which consummates the established order by drawing the conclusion from its own principle of reason, has existing society up to now become aware of another that is possible. The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted charm. Radiance is the appeasement of myth.

Falar de cultura foi sempre contra a cultura. O denominador "cultura" já contém, virtualmente, a tomada de posse, o enquadramento, a classificação que a cultura assume no reino da administração. Só a "administração" industrializada, radical e consequente, é plenamente adequada a esse conceito de cultura.

Die zivilisatorische Gesamttendenz der Konstellation von rationalen Mitteln und irrationalen Zwecken

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public.

This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.

Restraints upon our natural inclinations, which left to themselves do not automatically lead us to do what is good for us and often indeed lead us to evil, are not only necessary; they are the indispensable condition of civilized existence.

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me. Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.

The world has a lot to thank murderers for, when you come to think of it.