Theodor Adorno Quotes on Power

13 quotes

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.'

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

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

27. 'Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.'

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.'

48. 'In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them.'

69. 'People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.'

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

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

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

100. 'The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.'

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.'

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

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