Theodor Adorno quotes:

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

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

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

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

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

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

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

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

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

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

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.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

There is no love that is not an echo.

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

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

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.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

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

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

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

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

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

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

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.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness.

The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

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

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

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

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

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 error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

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

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

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

Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

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

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

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

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

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

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

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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

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

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Normality is death.

No emancipation without that of society.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.

All the world's not a stage.

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

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

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.