Theodor W. Adorno

There is no love that is not an echo.

The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

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

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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

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

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

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

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

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

He who integrates is lost.

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

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

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

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

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