Frankfurt Famous Quotes

The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt famously differentiates between lies and bullshit. Lies, he claims, are untruths deliberately intended to deceive. Bullshit, on the other hand, comes about when someone has no real interest in whether or not something they are saying is true or false at all.

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.

Rudi Dutschke summed up his strategy in 1967 with the famous phrase, “the long march through the institutions,” which Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School described as “working against the established institutions while working within them” and building “counterinstitutions.

Meanwhile, in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt-am-Main, Mayer Rothschild (1744–1812) and his sons had begun building the now famous finance house. What made their business unique was that Rothschild sent his five sons to open branches in the five busiest cities in Europe.

Lee Kun-hee, the third son of Samsung founder Lee Byung-chull, took over as chairman of Samsung in 1987. In 1993, he held a conference for hundreds of Samsung executives at a hotel in Frankfurt, Germany, where he delivered a three-day speech, which became known as the Frankfurt Declaration of 1993. There he famously told his staff, “Change everything but your wife and kids.

For Kracauer, the quintessential figure in this regard was undoubtedly Chaplin, and Roth’s comparison of Ginster to the figure of the Tramp bumbling his way through a department store finds ample confirmation in the praise Kracauer heaps on Chaplin in his reviews. His 1926 appraisal of Chaplin’s Gold Rush, for example, had been a hymn to the character’s profound humanity—albeit a humanity that asserts itself by retreating, by opposing the literally self-less figure of the Tramp to the “great ego-bundles” that constantly threaten to overwhelm him. Kracauer revels in the way Chaplin reduces the character to a lacuna, “a hole into which everything falls” and which has the power to shatter people’s self-perceptions. To Kracauer, the figure of the Tramp is touching, even transformative. “His powerlessness is dynamite,” Kracauer contends, describing Chaplin’s comedy as revelatory in its ability to show the world as it could be. Measured against the fact that the world persists as it is, Chaplin’s films provoke a form of laughter tinged with tears, for they bear witness to the disproportion “between the violence of the world and the meekness with which it is encountered.” As he notes these and other reactions to seeing Chaplin’s films during the mid- to late 1920s, Kracauer seems to be working out the poetic conception of the literary figure he would introduce to his readers soon after his encounters as a reviewer with The Gold Rush, or 1928’s The Circus (he also appears to have been a regular at a series of reruns of old Chaplin films that played at the Frankfurt Drexel Cinema just as he would have been writing his novel in late 1927 and early 1928). But there is another incarnation of Chaplin that resonates even more directly with Ginster. Though we have no record of when Kracauer first encountered Ballet mécanique from 1924, we can only guess at the impact this famous French avant-garde film would have had on the author of Ginster.