Quotes By Theodor Adorno

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

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.

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.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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.

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

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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.

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

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

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

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

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

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

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

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

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

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