Theodor Adorno Quotes (80 Quotes)

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

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

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

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

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Normality is death.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

Intelligence is a moral category.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks theyre only animals.

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.

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

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

There is no love that is not an echo.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.