The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor W. Adorno
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
There is no love that is not an echo.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
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.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
Normality is death.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
The whole is the false.
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
