Theodor Adorno
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter.
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through consequential logic becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and freezes.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.