Quotes By Theodor Adorno

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

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.

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.

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

Intelligence is a moral category.

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

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

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.

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

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.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

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.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

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