People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
Work while you work, play while you play – this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
In the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Triviality is evil – triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.
And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.