"We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless."

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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• "Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.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 decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the ..."
• "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. "
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• "Up to our days a man's membership of the upper or lower classes has been ..."
• "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. "