The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
There is no true life within a false life.
In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.
The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
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