Max Horkheimer Short Quotes

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Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.

Max Horkheimer
Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.

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.

Max Horkheimer
With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. … Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.

Max Horkheimer
It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule—in short, made part and parcel of production.

Max Horkheimer
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.

Max Horkheimer
The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience … produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

Max Horkheimer
The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.

Max Horkheimer
When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.

Max Horkheimer
In so far as words are not used obviously to calculate technically relevant probabilities or for other practical purposes, … they are in danger of being suspect as sales talk of some kind.

Max Horkheimer
Long after Plato's time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to 'our' interests.

Max Horkheimer