Quotes by Theodor Adorno

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
– Theodor Adorno
The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
– Theodor Adorno
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
– Theodor Adorno
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
– Theodor Adorno
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
– Theodor Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
– Theodor Adorno
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
– Theodor Adorno
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
– Theodor Adorno
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
– Theodor Adorno
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
– Theodor Adorno
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
– Theodor Adorno
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 Adorno
Not only is the self entwined in society it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
– Theodor Adorno
Normality is death.
– Theodor Adorno
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
– Theodor Adorno
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
– Theodor Adorno
No emancipation without that of society.
– Theodor Adorno
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
– Theodor Adorno
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
– Theodor Adorno
Intelligence is a moral category.
– Theodor Adorno
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
– Theodor Adorno
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.
– Theodor Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
– Theodor Adorno
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.
– Theodor Adorno
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
– Theodor Adorno
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
– Theodor Adorno
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
– Theodor Adorno
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
– Theodor Adorno
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
– Theodor Adorno
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
– Theodor Adorno
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
– 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.
– Theodor Adorno