Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime
People know what they want because they know what other people want.
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
There is no right life in the wrong one.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
There is no love that is not an echo.
Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.
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.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.
In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
There is no true life within a false life.
Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.
The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity
There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.
But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
One should never begrudge deletions.
The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.
Ich fürchte nicht die Rückkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Faschisten, sondern die Rückkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Demokraten.
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.
The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
The glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object.
Nowadays most people kick with the pricks.
A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.
A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.
