Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one.

Why do you all push us around?

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

Oppression is the essence of power.

People who are divided are easier to control.

Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

All oppression creates a state of war.

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

The one without a sword gets humiliated.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

Power is dangerous for those who do not have it.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

We have a full right, by our own best wisdom, and then even by compulsion to dictate terms and conditions to them [Native Americans] .... The Indian must be made to feel he is in the grasp of a superior.