Politics Quotes

"The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified."

"The state's power must be severely limited."

"The minimal state respects individual rights."

"Power without consent is morally problematic."

"The state cannot be justified through utility calculations."

"Consent is central to legitimate authority."

"The basis of legitimate authority is restricted."

"Legitimacy cannot be assumed for any system."

"The state's authority must be restricted and justified."

"The minimal state achieves a balance between freedom and order."

"The totally administered society is characterized by the disappearance of difference."

"The standardization of human beings is the hallmark of the culture industry."

"The integration of the working class into the system represents the crisis of critical theory."

"The culture industry pacifies potential resistance through entertainment and distraction."

"Ideological critique must show how false consciousness serves material interests."

"The totally administered society appears rational from within but is fundamentally irrational."

"The disaster of administered society lies in its apparent rationality and order."

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."

"The surest way to corruption is the accumulation of power."

"Plurality is the condition of all political life."

"A person is political not because he possesses the gift of rational argument but because he is able to act and to speak."

"Political freedom means the right to participate in public affairs and public happiness means pleasure, dignity and honor."

"Propaganda strives for the single point in the universe, the single truth."

"Credibility is as important to politics as power is to war."

"Public happiness is the only issue in which the majority has a stake."

"Bureaucracy is a form of government whose principle of legitimation and whose means of rule are hidden."

"Superfluousness begins when we have enough, but this is the moment when totalitarianism becomes possible."

"Modern totalitarianism is not the extension of absolute monarchy but a radically new form of government."

"The nation-state is the form in which man has organized himself politically since the modern age."

"Every totalitarian movement begins with the promise of complete salvation."