Theodor Adorno

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

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

Intelligence is a moral category.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

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

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

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.