Theodor Adorno quotes - page 5

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations. (Theodor Adorno)
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
Theodor Adorno
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
Theodor Adorno
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Theodor Adorno
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Theodor Adorno
The whole is the false.
Theodor Adorno
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
Theodor Adorno
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.
Theodor Adorno
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
Theodor Adorno
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
Theodor Adorno
Life has become the ideology of its own absence. (Theodor Adorno)
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
Theodor Adorno
He who integrates is lost.
Theodor Adorno
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
Theodor Adorno
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor Adorno
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them. (Theodor Adorno)
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
Theodor Adorno
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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
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