Theodor Adorno Doe Quotations

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

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

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.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

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 blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.

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.

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.