Quotes By Theodor Adorno

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.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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

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

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

Intelligence is a moral category.

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

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

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

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

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

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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.

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