Quotes
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.
And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at every level. The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master morality.
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.