Quotes

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

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