Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.