A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
Theodor Adorno

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.
Theodor Adorno

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Theodor Adorno

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
Theodor Adorno

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Theodor Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
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

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
Theodor Adorno

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Theodor Adorno


Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor Adorno

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Theodor Adorno

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Theodor Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Theodor Adorno

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor Adorno

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
Theodor Adorno

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Theodor Adorno

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Theodor Adorno

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor Adorno

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno