Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
— Theodor W. Adorno
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
No emancipation without that of society.
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
He who integrates is lost.
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
