Theodor Adorno Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
He who integrates is lost. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
He who matures early lives in anticipation. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 25
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 32
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 33
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
Intelligence is a moral category. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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Life has become the ideology of its own absence. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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No emancipation without that of society. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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Normality is death. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 47
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 48
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 49
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 50
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 51
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 52
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 53
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 54
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 56
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 57
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 58
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 60
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 61
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 62
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 63
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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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. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 66
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 70
The whole is the false. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 71
There is no love that is not an echo. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 72
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 73
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 74
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 75
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 76
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 77
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 78
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑
- 79
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly. Theodor Adorno | Refcard PDF ↑