Quotes By Theodor Adorno

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

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

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 has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

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

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

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

There is no love that is not an echo.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

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

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

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

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.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

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.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.