Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
— Theodor W. Adorno
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
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.
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
Intelligence is a moral category.
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.
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.
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Normality is death.
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
The whole is the false.
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
There is no love that is not an echo.
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
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.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
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.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
