"The knowledge that in per-history the objective tendency asserts itself over the heads of human beings, indeed by virtual of annihilating individual qualities, without the reconciliation of general and particular - constructed in thought - ever yet being accomplished in history, is distorted in Hegel: with serene indifference he opts once again for liquidation of the particular. Nowhere in his work is the primacy of the whole doubted. The more questionable the transition from reflective isolation to glorified totality becomes in history as in Hegelian logic, the more eagerly philosophy, as the justification of what exists, attaches itself to the triumphal car of objective tendencies." (17)
"Hegel, in hypostasizing both bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual, did not truly carry through the dialectic between the two." (17)
"For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been perpetrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud." (17)
"The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture itself might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself... As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated." (55)
"The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death." (56)
"Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means." (150)
"Stringency and totality, the bourgeois intellectual ideas of necessity and generality, do indeed circumscribe the formula of history, but for just this reason the constitution of society finds its precipitate in those great, immovable, lordly concepts against which dialectical criticism and practice are directed." (151)
"If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might ass that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside - what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic." (151)
"What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement." (151)
"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it." (219)
"but even if things have always been so, although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in India systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the thesis of the intensification of antagonisms." (233-234)
"Not only in the development of forces of production but also in the increasing pressure of domination does quantity change into quality." (234)
"Horror consists in its always remaining the same - the persistence of 'pre-history' - but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces." (234)
"Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of mind." (234)
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso Books, 2005).
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