Theodor Adorno

Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.

Theodor Adorno

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

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

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

Normality is death.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

Theodor Adorno

No emancipation without that of society.

Theodor Adorno

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Theodor Adorno

Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element.

Theodor Adorno

Metaphysical categories are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about, and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences.

Theodor Adorno

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Theodor Adorno

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Theodor Adorno

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

Theodor Adorno

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

It is not man's lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity.

Theodor Adorno