Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Theodor W. Adorno
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Intelligence is a moral category.
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.
Normality is death.
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
The whole is the false.
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
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.
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
There is no love that is not an echo.
He who integrates is lost.
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
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.
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
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.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
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