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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

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

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

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

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.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

There is no love that is not an echo.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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

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

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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

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

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

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

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

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

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

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

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

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

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

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

The whole is the false.

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

In the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

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

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.

Normality is death.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.