Theodor Adorno – 31 Quotes

31 Quotes by Theodor Adorno

Normality is death.

– Theodor Adorno

Intelligence is a moral category.

– Theodor Adorno

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

– Theodor Adorno

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

– Theodor Adorno

No emancipation without that of society.

– Theodor Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

– Theodor Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

– Theodor Adorno

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

– Theodor Adorno

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

– Theodor Adorno

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

– Theodor Adorno

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.

– Theodor Adorno

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

– Theodor Adorno

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

– Theodor Adorno

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

– Theodor Adorno

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

– Theodor Adorno

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

– Theodor Adorno

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

– Theodor Adorno

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

– Theodor Adorno

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

– Theodor Adorno

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

– Theodor Adorno

Work while you work, play while you play – this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

– Theodor Adorno

Not only is the self entwined in society it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

– Theodor Adorno

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

– Theodor Adorno

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

– Theodor Adorno

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

– Theodor Adorno

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

– Theodor Adorno

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

– Theodor Adorno

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

– 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

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

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.

– Theodor Adorno