Quotes from 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.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

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

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.

There is no true life within a false life.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

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

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

There is no love that is not an echo.

The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

The whole is the false.