“Anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”
“Dancing, the theatre, society, card-playing, games of chance, horses, women, drinking, traveling, and so on are not enough to ward off boredom where intellectual pleasures are rendered impossible by lack of intellectual needs. Thus a peculiar characteristic of the philistine is a dull, dry seriousness akin to that of animals.”
“Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.”
— Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
