Theodor W. Adorno - Minima Moralia (1951)

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The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

Theodor W. Adorno
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Theodor W. Adorno
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Theodor W. Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.

Theodor W. Adorno
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Theodor W. Adorno
In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.

Theodor W. Adorno
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

Theodor W. Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

Theodor W. Adorno
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

Theodor W. Adorno
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

Theodor W. Adorno
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

Theodor W. Adorno
The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

Theodor W. Adorno
The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

Theodor W. Adorno
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

Theodor W. Adorno