Theodor Adorno's Quotes

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

No emancipation without that of society.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

Normality is death.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.

The whole is the false.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

Intelligence is a moral category.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

He who integrates is lost.