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

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Normality is death.

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

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

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

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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

He who integrates is lost.

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

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

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

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

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

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

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

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.

Work while you work, play while you play – this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

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

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

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

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

The whole is the false.

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

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

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

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

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

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

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

Intelligence is a moral category.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

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

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

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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.

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

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

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.