Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.Collection: Power
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Society
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.Collection: Art
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.Collection: Health
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.Collection: Happiness
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.Collection: Independence
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.Collection: Work
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.Collection: Art
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.Collection: Freedom
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.Collection: Best
Intelligence is a moral category.Collection: Intelligence
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.Collection: Society
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.Collection: Love
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.Collection: Death
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.Collection: Alone
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.Collection: Power
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.Collection: Truth
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.Collection: Society
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.Collection: Life
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.Collection: Intelligence
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.Collection: Age
Normality is death.Collection: Death
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.Collection: Technology
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
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.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
The whole is the false.
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
No emancipation without that of society.
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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.
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
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.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.