Quotes from Theodor Adorno

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

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.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

Intelligence is a moral category.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

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

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

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

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.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

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.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

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

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

No emancipation without that of society.

Normality is death.

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 triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.