Theodor Adorno

Intelligence is a moral category.

Theodor Adorno

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Theodor Adorno

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

Theodor Adorno

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Theodor Adorno

In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them.

Theodor Adorno

In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence.

Theodor Adorno

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Theodor Adorno

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

Theodor Adorno

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Theodor Adorno

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

Theodor Adorno

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

Theodor Adorno

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.

Theodor Adorno

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

Theodor Adorno

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Theodor Adorno

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

Theodor Adorno

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.

Theodor Adorno

He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.

Theodor Adorno

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

Theodor Adorno

He who integrates is lost.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno