'After Auschwitz,’ said Theodor Adorno, student of authoritarianism, ‘there should be no poetry.’ He was wrong. But the poetry should be about Auschwitz.
A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known--that's sin.
All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.
Alongside the wisdom of true conservatism is the danger that the status quo might become corrupt and its corruption self-servingly exploited.
And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.
Artists must be contending with something they do not understand, or they are not artists.
Because we are so scientific now--and so determinedly materialistic--it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist.
But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it.
But perhaps [the bricklayer] is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good.
But the mere fact that social order reigns to some degree does not mean that a given society has come to explicitly understand its own behavior, its own moral code.
But you can be certain, you want-to-be tyrants, that your slaves will take their revenge where they can, even if that means merely being much less than they could be.
Communism, in particular, was attractive not so much to oppressed workers, its hypothetical beneficiaries, but to intellectuals--to those whose arrogant pride in intellect assured them they were always right.
Do not foolishly confuse ‘nice’ with ‘good.’
Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight.
Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.
Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice. To accept the truth means to sacrifice--and if you have rejected the truth for a long time, then you’ve run up a dangerously large sacrificial debt.
Failing to look under the bed when you strongly suspect a monster is lurking there is not an advisable strategy.
Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.
Freud had a point. He was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him.
Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.
Genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power. This constraint manifests itself when the authoritative agent cares, and takes responsibility, for those over whom the exertion of power is possible.
Hating life, despising life--even for the genuine pain that life inflicts--merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse.
How is it possible for us to retain the advantages of simplification, without falling prey to the accompanying blindness? The answer is to be found in the constant dialogue between genuinely different types of people.
I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences and infer the motivation.
If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.
If you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency…. In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.
If you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not willfully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?
If you don’t believe in brick walls, you will still be injured when you run headlong into one.
If you want to become invaluable in a workplace--in any community--just do the useful things no one else is doing.
It has taken since time immemorial for us to organize ourselves...into the functional hierarchies that both specify our perceptions and actions, and define our interactions with the natural and social world. Profound gratitude for that gift is the only proper response.
It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. It is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness….
It is far better to render beings in your care competent than to protect them.
It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.
Just exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway? How was it that so many tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and ideologies? How was it that we discovered something worse, much worse, than the aristocracy and corrupt religious beliefs that communism and fascism sought so rationally to supplant?
Make no mistake about it, however: you age as you drift, just as rapidly as you age as you strive.
Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power.
One of the things that has constantly amazed me is the delight that decent people take in the ability to provide opportunities to those over whom they currently exercise authority.
Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through falsification.
Regardless of its hypothetical virtues...the implementation of Marxism was a disaster everywhere it was attempted….
The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written and edited by many people. It's a truly emergent document--a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years.
The escape from tyranny is often followed not by Paradise, but by a sojourn in the desert, aimless, confused and deprived.
The only time no ever means no in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.
The socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue.
The stories we can neither ignore nor forget are unforgettable [because] they speak to something we know, but do not know that we know.
The stories we can neither ignore nor forget are unforgettable [because] they speak to something we know, but do not know that we know.
The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.
There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation.
There is no shortage of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them are only tyrannical wannabes.
Trust between people who are not naive is a form of courage, because betrayal is always a possibility, and because this is consciously understood.
Tyranny is...not good for the tyrant—because he or she becomes a tyrant, and there is nothing ennobling about that.
Violence, after all, is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. It's easy. It's peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.
When ignorance destroys culture, monsters will emerge.
When you have something to say, silence is a lie--and tyranny feeds on lies.
You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can't even set the clock on your microwave.