Theodor Adorno

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

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

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

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.