Famous Quotes

Quotes by Theodor Adorno

• 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.
• An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
• Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
• Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
• 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.
• Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
• Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
• 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.
• History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
• 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.
• In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
• Intelligence is a moral category.
• Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
• Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
• 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.
• Normality is death.
• Not only is the self entwined in society it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
• Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
• Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
• The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
• The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
• The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
• The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
• True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
• Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
• Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
• Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.