Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.

Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

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

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.