Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
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.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
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.
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 human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
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.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
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.
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.
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
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.
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.