Wealth & Money Quote by Theodor Adorno

Adorno takes a cliche that passes for common sense and uses it as a scalpel. "Time is money" is usually motivational wallpaper; here it becomes an indictment of how capitalism colonizes ethics. If time really is money, then saving it starts to look not just prudent but virtuous. You can feel the trap closing: thrift turns into morality, and self-interest gets laundered as consideration for others. The everyday rush becomes a civic duty.

The most Adornian move is the way he frames "parsimony" as excused by altruism. This is the bourgeois conscience at work: impatience and withdrawal are recast as responsibility. Don't linger, don't listen, don't dwell - you're "respecting" other people's time. The social world gets reorganized around efficiency, and anyone who resists can be painted as wasteful, immature, or even unethical. It's a critique of a culture where the tempo of life is set by exchange value, then retrofitted into a code of conduct.

Context matters: Adorno is writing out of mid-century mass society, where rationalization and the performance of "straight-forwardness" become survival strategies. That final, clipped "One is straight-forward" reads like a bitter punchline. It mimics the self-satisfied tone of the efficient modern subject, proud of being direct, brisk, no-nonsense - as if speed were honesty. Adorno's subtext: when time becomes currency, even character is priced by how fast it moves.