Quotes By Theodor Adorno

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

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.