"The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to."

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More quotes from: Theodor Adorno

• "A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself. "
• "A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. ..."
• "Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. "
• "All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at ..."
• "All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay ..."
• "An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the ..."
• "And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily ..."
• "Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews. "
• "Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. "
• "Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and ..."
• "Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what ..."
• "But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain. "
• "Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own ..."
• "Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated. "
• "Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people. "
• "Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part of organic life itself, is ..."
• "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. "
• "Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure... The ..."
• "Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination. "
• "Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be ..."
• "Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. "
• "Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of ..."
• "For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. "
• "Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed ..."
• "Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, ..."
• "Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic. "
• "He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof. "
• "He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image ..."
• "He who integrates is lost. "
• "He who matures early lives in anticipation. "
• "He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He ..."
• "He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing ..."
• "History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it. "
• "Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. "
• "If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods. "
• "If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and ..."
• "In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to ..."
• "In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'. "
• "In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. "
• "In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. "
• "In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew. "
• "In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of ..."
• "In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings ..."

• "In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid ..."
• "In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. ..."
• "Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of ..."
• "Intelligence is a moral category. "
• "It is not man's lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the ..."
• "Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of ..."
• "Life has become the ideology of its own absence. "
• "Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals. "
• "Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar. "
• "Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength. "
• "Metaphysical categories are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time ..."
• "Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, ..."
• "Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. "
• "No emancipation without that of society. "
• "No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit. "
• "None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. "
• "Normality is death. "
• "Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the ..."
• "Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute ..."
• "Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has ..."
• "People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation ..."
• "Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities ..."
• "Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. "
• "Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the ..."
• "Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, ..."
• "Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does ..."
• "Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and ..."
• "Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian ule. Its organization also embraces those at ..."
• "Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations. "
• "Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made ..."
• "Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. "
• "That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers ..."
• "The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own ..."
• "The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was ..."
• "The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience ..."
• "The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it ..."
• "The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their ..."
• "The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to ..."
• "The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly ..."
• "The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong. "
• "The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners. "
• "The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his ..."

• "The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. "
• "The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all ..."
• "The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might ..."
• "The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as simple antitheses is false, ..."
• "The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated. "
• "The intellectuals themselves are already so heavily committed to what is endorsed in their isolated ..."
• "The joke of our time is the suicide of intention. "
• "The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, ..."
• "The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at ..."
• "The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden ..."
• "The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously ..."
• "The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, ..."
• "The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt ..."
• "The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the ascertainment of the truth, rejects at ..."
• "The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their ..."
• "The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. "
• "The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality. "
• "The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass. "
• "The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. "
• "The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal ..."
• "The whole is the false. "
• "The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much ..."
• "There is no love that is not an echo. "
• "There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in the conflicts ..."
• "They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their ..."
• "Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think. "
• "Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has ..."
• "To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of ..."
• "To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults. "
• "Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without ..."
• "Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization ..."
• "True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves. "
• "Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one ..."
• "Up to our days a man's membership of the upper or lower classes has been ..."
• "We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are ..."
• "What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, ..."
• "Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that ..."
• "When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality. "
• "Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the ..."
• "Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of ..."
• "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly. "