THEODOR W. ADORNO

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

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

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

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.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

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

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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

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

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.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

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

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

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

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

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

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.