Quotes by Theodor Adorno

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

Theodor Adorno

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Theodor Adorno

The whole is the false.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

Theodor Adorno

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

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

Theodor Adorno

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

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

Intelligence is a moral category.

Theodor Adorno

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Theodor Adorno

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Theodor Adorno

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno