“Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.”
Art
“A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.”
HappinessAll Quotes by Theodor Adorno
“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.”
Power“Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.”
Truth“A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.”
Happiness“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.”
Technology“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“The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.”
Power“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”
Life“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.”
Society“None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.”
Peace“An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.”
Society“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.”
Money“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”
Love“Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.”
Work“Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.”
Happiness“Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.”
Death“No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.”
Alone“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.”
Art“Not only is the self entwined in society it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.”
Society“Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”
Freedom