The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

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

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

No emancipation without that of society.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

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.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

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

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

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

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

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

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

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

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

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

Intelligence is a moral category.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

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

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

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

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

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

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

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