Best Adorno Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. — 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

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

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. — Theodor Adorno

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dissonance is the truth about harmony. — 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