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

- Theodor 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 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 Adorno

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

- Theodor Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

- Theodor Adorno

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

- Theodor Adorno

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

- Theodor Adorno

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

- Theodor Adorno

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

- Theodor Adorno

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

- Theodor Adorno

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

- Theodor Adorno

No emancipation without that of society.

- Theodor Adorno

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

- Theodor Adorno

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

- Theodor Adorno

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

- Theodor Adorno

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

- Theodor Adorno

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

- Theodor Adorno

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

- Theodor Adorno

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

- Theodor Adorno

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

- Theodor Adorno