Theodor Adorno Quotes

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

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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

He who integrates is lost.

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

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

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Intelligence is a moral category.

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

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.

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

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 matures early lives in anticipation.

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

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

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

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.

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.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.