Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it.

Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

What you're saying is that 'I, the superior elite, will take care of you.' Why? Because, you see, that superior, elite group needs to feel superior and elite. And they can't be superior and elite unless you have a whole lot of people down there groveling around. So you keep them down there by feeding them.

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice never attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

At a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration.

I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave, and you don't have to think for yourself, or you're a master, and you don't have to work for yourself.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.

It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.