Adorno Quotes & Sayings

Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain. — Theodor Adorno

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. — 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

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed. — Theodor Adorno

Kitsch parodies catharsis ... It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts ... — Theodor Adorno

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth. — Theodor Adorno

No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. — Theodore Adorno

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply. Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality. — Theodor W. Adorno

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

The late Franz Borkenau once said, after he had broken with the Communist Party, that he could no longer put up with the practice of discussing municipal regulations in the categories of Hegelian logic, and Hegelian logic in the spirit of meetings of the town council. — Theodor W. Adorno

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. — Theodor W. 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

If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

The pleasure of thinking - it cannot be recommended." - Theodor W. Adorno — Eric Jarosinski

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday. — Theodor Adorno

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

In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. — Theodor W. Adorno

Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment. — Theodor Adorno

In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object. — Theodor W. Adorno

What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness. — 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

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

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic. — 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

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. — Theodor Adorno

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. — Azar Nafisi

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century. — Theodor Adorno

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

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture. — Theodor W. Adorno

(Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos', — Tom Service

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

Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive. — Theodor W. Adorno

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense. — 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

Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil. — Theodor W. Adorno

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. — Theodor W. Adorno

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream. — 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

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality. — 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

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage. — Theodor W. Adorno

Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end. — Theodor W. 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

There is something embarrassing in ... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. — Theodor Adorno

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength. — Theodor W. Adorno

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. — Theodor W. Adorno

True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did. — Susan Sontag

It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends. — Theodor Adorno

Life has become the ideology of its own absence. — Theodor Adorno

Nowadays most people kick with the pricks. — Theodor W. Adorno

Dissonance is the truth about harmony. — Theodor W. Adorno

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. — Theodor Adorno

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. — Theodor W. Adorno

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. — Theodor Adorno

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory. — Theodor W. Adorno

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. — Theodor Adorno

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. — Theodor W. Adorno

Intelligence is a moral category. — Theodor Adorno

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects. — Theodor W. Adorno

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them. — Theodor W. Adorno

There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. — Theodor W. Adorno

It is up to the school more than anything else to work against barbarism. ... By barbarism, I do not mean the Beatles. — T. W. Adorno

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews. — Theodor Adorno

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying. — Theodor W. Adorno

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward. — Theodor Adorno

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

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads. — Theodor W. Adorno

All the world's not a stage. — Theodor Adorno

Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness. — Theodor Adorno

But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men. — Theodor W. Adorno

There is no love that is not an echo. — Theodor W. Adorno

The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

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

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible. — Theodor Adorno

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

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. — Theodor Adorno

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies. — Theodor W. Adorno

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment. — Theodor Adorno

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God? — Theodor W. 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

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth — Theodor W. Adorno

Refusing what Adorno called that 'comfort in the uncomfortable' taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe. — Michael Richardson

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. — 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 recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. — Theodor Adorno

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