Theodor Adorno People Quotations

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

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

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

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.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

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.

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.