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.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
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.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Intelligence is a moral category.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
No emancipation without that of society.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
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.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
The whole is the false.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
- Theodor Adorno Quote
