Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

The rich swell up with pride, the poor from hunger.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

Poor men's words have little weight.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

The First Law of Class Warfare: Once inequalities develop, the upper classes can, with relative ease, drastically reduce the probability of success for any equalizing challenges to the system.

I come from the poor people, and I have been here working my whole stinkin' career for people who don't have a chance, and I really resent anybody that says I'm doing it for the rich. Give me a break.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

It's the rich you can terrorize. The poor have nothing to lose.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

The Tea Party is but one manifestation of a widening perception that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to “raise” the poor.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.