How it works

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.

Theodor Adorno
Not a MindZip member yet
Happiness
Thought
Random

Explore more quotes

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
Theodor Adorno
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
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
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Theodor Adorno
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.
Theodor Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
Theodor Adorno
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Theodor Adorno
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
Theodor 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 Adorno
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Theodor Adorno
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
Theodor Adorno
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
Theodor Adorno
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Theodor Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor 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 Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Theodor Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Theodor Adorno
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
Theodor Adorno
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Theodor Adorno
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Theodor Adorno
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
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
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
Theodor Adorno
Intelligence is a moral category.
Theodor Adorno
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Theodor Adorno
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Theodor Adorno
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.
Theodor Adorno
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Theodor Adorno
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Theodor Adorno
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
Theodor Adorno
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
Theodor Adorno
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
Theodor Adorno
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Theodor Adorno
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
Theodor Adorno
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor Adorno
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor Adorno
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
Theodor Adorno
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Theodor Adorno
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
Theodor Adorno
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor Adorno
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor 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 Adorno