Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. 

But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you - the social reformer - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

We can only learn to love by loving.

To eat, teeth must meet.

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.

In the human reality, all existence that spends itself in procuring the prerequisites of existence is thus an "untrue" and unfree existence. Obviously this reflects the not at all ontological condition of a society based on the proposition that freedom is incompatible with the activity of procuring the necessities of life, that this activity is the "natural" function of a specific class, and that cognition of the truth and true existence imply freedom from the entire dimension of such activity. ... Society still is organized in such a way that procuring the necessities of life constitutes the full-time and life-long occupation of specific social classes, which are therefore unfree and prevented from a human existence. In this sense, the classical proposition according to which truth is incompatible with enslavement by socially necessary labor is still valid.

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced-deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.

The society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).

Operational analysis ... cannot raise the decisive question whether the consent itself was not the work of manipulation-a question for which the actual state of affairs provides ample justification. The analysis cannot raise it because it would transcend its terms toward transitive meaning-toward a concept of democracy which would reveal the democratic election as a rather limited democratic process. Precisely such a non-operational concept is the one rejected by the authors as "unrealistic" because it defines democracy on too articulate a level as the clear-cut control of representation by the electorate-popular control as popular sovereignty.

The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

This organization of functional discourse is of vital importance; it serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason.

No, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.

For thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function - thus it depends on those who control these requirements.

The Superego, in censoring the unconscious and in implanting conscience, also censors the censor.

To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.

An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a "level of articulate opinion and ideology" which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as "unrealistic"-has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And-if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.

The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the "meaning" of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer.

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them.

Is this fight against history part of the fight against a dimension of the mind in which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop-faculties and forces that might hinder the total coordination of the individual with the society? Remembrance of the Fast may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of "mediation" which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts. Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life again.