Theodor W. Adorno

“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.”

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”

“Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.”

“Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by r...”

“Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of...”

“Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from wor...”

“The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.”

“But the castration of perception by a court of control that denies it any anticipatory desire, forces it thereby into a pattern of helplessly reiterating what is already known.”

“It would be rash […] to assume that the dwindling of family authority in present society automatically constitutes an element of progress and liberation. On the one hand, the individual’s mo...”

“The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.”

“Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.”

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.”

“Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.”

“In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.”

“Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.”

“He who matures early lives in anticipation.”

“The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.”

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

“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.”

“The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.”