Theodor W. Adorno - Minima Moralia (1951)

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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
Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.

Theodor W. Adorno
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

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
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
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

Theodor W. Adorno
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

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
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

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

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

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

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

Theodor W. Adorno
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Theodor W. Adorno
In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Theodor W. Adorno
The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

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

Theodor W. Adorno