Geoff’s Reviews > Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life > Status Update

"No sunrise, even in mountains, is pompous, triumphal, imperial; each one is faint and timorous, like a hope that all may yet be well, and it is this very unobtrusiveness of the mightiest light that is moving and overpowering."

"The existence of bread factories, turning the prayer that we be given our daily bread into a mere metaphor and an avowal of desperation, argues more strongly against the possibility of Christianity than all the enlightened critiques of the life of Jesus."

"For only leaders who resembled the people of the country in their ignorance of the world and global economics could harness them to war and their pig-headedness to an enterprise wholly unhampered by reflection."

"In repressive society the concept of man is itself a parody of divine likeness. The mechanism of 'pathetic projection' determines that those in power perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of reflecting back the human as precisely what is different."

"Love of stone walls and barred windows is the last resort of someone who sees and has nothing else to love. Both are cases of the same ignominious adaptation which, in order to endure the world's horror, attributes reality to wishes and meaning to senseless compulsion."

"The hysteric who wanted the miraculous has thus given way to the furiously efficient imbecile who cannot wait for the triumph of doom."

"Weakness posing as strength betrayed the thought of the allegedly rising bourgeoisie to ideology, even when the class was thundering against tyranny. 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."

"...the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction."

"Nothing less is asked of the thinker today than that he should be at every moment both within things and outside them - Munchhausen pulling himself out of the bog by his pig-tail becomes the pattern of knowledge which wishes to be more than either verification or speculation."

One of those books that formulates clearly so many things I wish to be able to express but am not well-read or intelligent enough to express by myself - almost every section is followed by an emphatic "Yes!"