Theodor Adorno Quotes & Sayings

The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself. — Theodor Adorno

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated. — Theodor Adorno

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers — Theodor Adorno

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation ... kitsch — Theodor Adorno

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation. — Theodor Adorno

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language. — Theodor Adorno

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew. — Theodor Adorno

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve. — Theodor Adorno

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact. — Theodor Adorno

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. — Theodor Adorno

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils. — Theodor Adorno

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults. — Theodor Adorno

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

The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority. — Theodor Adorno

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit. — Theodor Adorno

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task. — Theodor Adorno

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. — Theodor Adorno

On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability. — Theodor Adorno

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations. — Theodor Adorno

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell. — Theodor Adorno

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. — Theodor Adorno

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society. — Theodor Adorno

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself. — Theodor Adorno

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past. — Theodor Adorno

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. — Theodor Adorno

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. — Theodor Adorno

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous. — Theodor Adorno

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods. — Theodor Adorno

...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it. — Theodor Adorno

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it. — Theodor Adorno

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

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination. — Theodor Adorno

The whole is the false. — Theodor Adorno

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it. — Theodor Adorno

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images. — Theodor Adorno

Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation. — Theodor Adorno

He who matures early lives in anticipation. — Theodor Adorno

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern. — Theodor Adorno

The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check. — Theodor Adorno

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar. — Theodor Adorno

Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case. — Theodor Adorno

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. — Theodor Adorno

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings. — Theodor Adorno

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute. — Theodor Adorno

Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood. — Theodor Adorno

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

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason. — Theodor Adorno

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating. — Theodor Adorno

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic. — Theodor Adorno

It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author. — Theodor Adorno

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality. — Theodor Adorno

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. — Theodor Adorno

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. — Theodor Adorno

The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. — Theodor Adorno

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

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. — Theodor Adorno

Normality is death. — Theodor Adorno

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion. — Theodor Adorno

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet. — Theodor Adorno

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think. — Theodor Adorno

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function. — Theodor Adorno

The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion. — Theodor Adorno

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane. — Theodor Adorno

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. — Theodor Adorno

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy — Theodor Adorno

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong. — Theodor Adorno

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. — Theodor Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. — Theodor Adorno

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences. — Theodor Adorno

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself. — Theodor Adorno

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them. — Theodor Adorno

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction. — Theodor Adorno

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality. — Theodor Adorno

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

The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil. — Theodor Adorno

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it. — Theodor Adorno

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality. — Theodor Adorno

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

Intelligence is a moral category. — Theodor Adorno

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. — Theodor Adorno

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent. — Theodor Adorno

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves. — Theodor Adorno

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market. — Theodor Adorno

He who integrates is lost. — Theodor Adorno

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power. — Theodor Adorno

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing. — Theodor Adorno

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline. — Theodor Adorno

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite. — Theodor Adorno

Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum. — Theodor Adorno

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain. — Theodor Adorno

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof. — Theodor Adorno

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled. — Theodor Adorno

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz. — Theodor Adorno

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean. — Theodor Adorno

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life. — Theodor Adorno

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners. — Theodor Adorno

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. — Theodor Adorno

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. — Theodor Adorno

In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own. — Theodor Adorno

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion. — Theodor Adorno