Theodor Adorno Quotes on Ethics

21 quotes

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

8. 'Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.'

9. 'All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at every level. The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master morality.'

15. 'Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.'

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

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

37. '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.'

41. '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.'

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

52. 'Intelligence is a moral category.'

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

68. 'Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.'

86. 'The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.'

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

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

102. '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.'

109. 'The scientific industry has its exact counterpart in the kind of minds it harnesses: they no longer need to do themselves any violence in becoming their own voluntary and zealous overseers. Even if they show themselves, outside their official capacity, to be quite human and sensible being, they are paralysed by pathic stupidity the moment they begin to think professionally.'

121. 'Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.'

122. 'To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.'

123. 'To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.'

129. 'We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless.'

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