In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
He who integrates is lost.
The taboos that constitute a man’s intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.Collection: Strong