Theodor Adorno
The whole is the false.
The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the ascertainment of the truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity.
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.
The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interest, both freely accepted mutual responsibility.
The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
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.
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
The intellectuals themselves are already so heavily committed to what is endorsed in their isolated sphere, that they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as simple antitheses is false, among other reasons, in overlooking the moment of enlightenment in the genesis of beauty. Enlightenment does not merely dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of beauty in the first place.
The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.