Theodor Adorno Quotes

Normality is death.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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

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

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

No emancipation without that of society.

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

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

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.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

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

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

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

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

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