Quotes By Theodor Adorno

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

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

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.

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

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

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

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

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

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

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

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

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

The whole is the false.

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.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

He who integrates is lost.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.