Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

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

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

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

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

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

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

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

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

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

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.