Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.
Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
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 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.
In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
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.
Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.