Theodor W. Adorno

“Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.”

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

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

“Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.”

“Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.”

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

“Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.”

“Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.”

“Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.”

“There is no love that is not an echo.”

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

“No emancipation without that of society.”

“Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.”

“Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.”

“Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.”

“None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.”

“If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.”

“The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.”

“Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.”

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