yet even more

I've been doing A LOT of reading, and I find these things meaningful on some level. I want to share.

Max Horkheimer, "The End of Reason"
- "Rationality in the form of obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think."
- "Nietzsche proclaimed the death of morality; modern psychology has devoted itself to exploring it. Psychoanalysis as the adjustment form of modern skepticism triumphed over moral law through its discovery and unmasking of the father in the superego. This psychology, however, was the "owl of Minerva" which took it's flight when the shades of dark were already gathering over the whole sphere of private life. The father may still posses a superego, but the child has long unmasked it, together with the ego and the character. Today the child imitates only performances and achievements; he accepts not ideas, but matters of fact."
- "The Rationalistic society gave children legends and fairy tales so that they might mirror hope back to their disillusioned elders."
- "During good times, children are trained as future heirs; during bad times, as prospective breadwinners for their parents..."
- "The terror which pushes reason is at the same time the last means of stopping it, so close has truth come. If the atomized and disintegrating men of today have become capable of living without property, without location, without time, they also have abandoned the ego in which all prudence and all stupidity of historical reason as well as its compliance with domination was sustained. The progress of reason that leads to it's self-destruction has come to an end; there is nothing left but barbarism or freedom."

Max Horkheimer, "The Authoritarian State"
- "the consequence that flows from historical materialism today as formerly from Rousseau or the Bible, that is, the insight that "now or in a hundred years" the horror will come to an end, was always appropriate."
- "The belief that one is acting in the name of something greater than oneself is bankrupt."
- "The mass media assimilate the revolution by absorbing its leaders into their list of celebrities. The isolated individual who is not appointed or protected by any power cannot expect fame. Even so, he is a power because everyone is isolated. Their only weapon is the word."

Baudelaire : "You have no right to despise the present."

Michel Foucault -
On the Genealogy of Ethics
- "Plato asks, "How can the eye see itself?" The answer is apparently very simple, but in fact it is very complicated. For Plato, one cannot simply look at oneself in a mirror; one has to look into another eye, that is one in oneself, however in oneself in the shape of the eye of the other. And there, in the other pupil, one will see oneself: the pupil serves as the mirror. And, in the same manner, the soul contemplating itself in another soul (or in the divine element of the other soul), which is like its pupil, will recognize it's divine element."
Technologies of the Self
- "Faults are simply good intentions left undone."
The Masked Philosopher
- "Hence too, the declaration, repeated over and over, that everything nowadays is empty, desolate, uninteresting, unimportant: a declaration that obviously comes from Those who, not doing anything themselves, consider there are too many others who are."
About the Concept of the "Dangerous Individual" In Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry
- "...those in power treat political misdemeanors in the same way as ordinary crimes in order to discredit them. Little by little, an image was built up of an enemy of society who can equally well be a revolutionary or a murderer - since, after all, revolutionaries do sometimes kill."
Questions of Method
- "Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, "this, then, is what needs to be done." It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. It's use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have to lay down the law for the law, It isn't a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is."
Lives of Infamous Men
- "A comical effect, no doubt: there is something ludicrous in summoning all the power of words, and through them the supreme power of heaven and earth, around insignificant disorders or such ordinary woes."
Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
- "What is found at the historical beginning of things in not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.
- "Where the soul pretends unification or the Me fabricates a coherent identity, the genealogist sets out to study the beginning - numberless beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by the historical eye. The analysis of descent permits the dissociation of the Me, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events."
- "'Effective' history leaves nothing around the self, deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot it's traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."
- "...street vendors of empty identities."
quotes from Nietzsche used in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"
"During barbarous ages... if the strength of an individual declined, if he felt himself tired or sick, melancholy or satiated and, as a better man, that is less dangerous. His pessimistic ideas only take form as words or reflections. In this frame of mind, he either became a thinker and prophet or used his imagination to feed his superstitions." - The Dawn of Day
"I can't stand these lustful eunuchs of history, all the seductions of ascetic ideal; I can't stand these blanched tombs producing life or those tired and indifferent beings who dress up in the part of wisdom and adopt an objective point of view." - On the Genealogy of Morals