Quotes By Theodor Adorno

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

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.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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.

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.

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

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

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