"The conflicts in the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere historical interludes any more than, according to the Dialectic, fascism was at that time. Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in the face of great historical trend." (xi)
"Our prognosis regarding the associated lapse from enlightenment into positivism, into myth of that which is the case, and finally of the identity of intelligence and hostility to mind, has been overwhelmingly confirmed." (xii)
"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." (xiv)
"If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history." (xiv-xv)
"Today, however, motorized history is rushing ahead of such intellectual developments, and the official spokesmen, who have other concerns, are liquidating the theory to which they owe their place in the sun before it has time to prostitute itself completely." (xv)
"freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking" (xvi)
"False clarity is only another name for myth. Myth was always obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts." (xvii)
"The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers." (xvii)
"While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them." (xvii)
"The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once." (xvii)
"That the hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen and the sports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain, within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, does matter." (xviii)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
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