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Theodor Adorno [1903-1969] German

Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society.
He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the work of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society.

Art, Society, Intelligence, Love, Power, Death, Freedom, Health, History, Independence, Life, Money, Peace, Strength, Technology, Truth, Work

Quote	Tags	Rank
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.	Freedom	101
The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.	Truth	101
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.	Art	102
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.		102
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.		103
No emancipation without that of society.	Society	104
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.		105
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.	Peace	106
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.		107
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.	Art	108
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.		109
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.	Love, Strength	110
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.		111
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.		112
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.	Society	113
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.		114
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.	Money	115
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.	Work	116
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.		117
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.		118
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.	Love, Power	119
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.		120
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.		121
There is no love that is not an echo.		122
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.		123
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.	Power	124
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.		125
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.		126
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.	Life	201
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.	Art	202
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.	Society	203
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.		204
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.	Intelligence	205
He who matures early lives in anticipation.		206
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.		207
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.		208
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.		209
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.	History	210
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.		211
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.		212
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.	Health	213
Normality is death.	Death	214
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.		215
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.		216
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.		217
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.		218
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.		219
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.	Technology	220
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.		221
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.		222
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.		223
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.		224
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.		225
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.		226
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.		301
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.		302
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.		303
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.		304
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.		305
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.		306
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.		307
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.		308
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.		309
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.		310
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.		311
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.		312
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.		313
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.		314
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.		315
He who integrates is lost.		316
The whole is the false.		317
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.		318
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.		319
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.		320
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.		321
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.	Art	322
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.	Independence	323
Intelligence is a moral category.	Intelligence	324
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.		325
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.		326
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.		401

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