- Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
- No emancipation without that of society.
- Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
- Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
- Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
- Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
- Normality is death.
- The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
- No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
- Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
- Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
- Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
- Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
- Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
- Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
- Intelligence is a moral category.
- None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
- The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
- The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
- The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
- Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
- The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.
- The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
- The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
- Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
- The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
- Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
- The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
- The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
- The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
- The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
- The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
- In the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
- The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
- Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
- Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
- Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
- Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
- Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
- Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
- But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
- For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
- Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
- Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
- Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
- 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.
- Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
- 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.
- A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
- Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
- History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
- The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
- In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
- In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
- In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’.
- In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
- 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.
- Fascism is itself less ‘ideological’, in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
- Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
- In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
- 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.
- He who matures early lives in anticipation.
- He who integrates is lost.
- He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
- He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
- Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
- If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
- Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
- There is no love that is not an echo.
- The whole is the false.
- Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
- To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.
- Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
- 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 day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
- When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
- Work while you work, play while you play – this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
- The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.