Theodor Quotes & Sayings

Variety is the spice of life, a truth which, of course, every happy marriage seems to contradict. — Theodor Fontane

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

Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream. Antagonism is essential to man's greatest efforts. — Theodor Herzl

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

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.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

Marcus Crassus cannot, any more than Pompeius, be reckoned among the unconditional adherents of the oligarchy. — Theodor Mommsen

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

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

The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror. — Theodor Haecker

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

I prefer being penetrated by iron to seeing Palestine is loose. — Theodor Herzl

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

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. — Theodor Herzl

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

The small share of happiness attainable by man exists only insofar as he is able to cease to think of himself. — Theodor Reik

All beauty of this world is wet with the dew of tears. — Theodor Haecker

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 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

If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted. — Theodor Mommsen

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think. — 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 one sure means of dealing with boredom is to care for someone else, to do something kind and good. — Theodor Haecker

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

I will give you my definition of a nation, and you can add the adjective 'Jewish.' A Nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. Then, if you add to that the word 'Jewish' you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation. — Theodor Herzl

Death accompanies us at every step and enables us to use those moments when life smiles at us to feel more deeply the sweetness of life. The more certain the end, the more tempting the minute. — Theodor Fontane

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

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

Life has become the ideology of its own absence. — 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

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

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

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

When I remember thee in days to come, O Jerusalem, it will not be with pleasure. The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys ... The amiable dreamer of Nazareth has only contributed to increasing the hatred ... What superstition and fanaticism on every side! — Theodor Herzl

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 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

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

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

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

What We want is to make it possible for our unfortunate people to live a life of industry for it is by steady work alone that we hope for our physical and moral rehabilitation. For this reason above all we have undertaken to rally our people around our ideal. — Theodor Herzl

We, the Jews, not only have degenerated and are located at the end of the path, we spoiled the blood of all the peoples of Europe ... Jews are descended from a mixture of waste of all races. — Theodor Herzl

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

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

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

If you will it, it is no dream. — Theodor Herzl

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

Without passion, there is no genius. — Theodor Mommsen

The thyroid cells take up iodine with particular avidity and are able to store it up in great quantities. — Emil Theodor Kocher

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

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

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

The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians. — Theodor Mommsen

There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. — 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

Take action and be brave Theodor for it is fear and inaction that kills. — Robert Radcliffe

It is always possible to approach a goal by a detour. — Theodor Reik

Keep your analysis pure and virtuous. — Theodor Billroth

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

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

Dissonance is the truth about harmony. — Theodor W. 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 man who has never made a fool of himself in love will never be wise in love. — Theodor Reik

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

The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting. — Theodor Reik

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

To express unafraid and unashamed what one really thinks and feels is one of the great consolations of life. — Theodor Reik

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

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

To acquire possession of Latium was of the most decisive importance to Etruria, which was separated by the Latins alone from the Volscian towns that were dependent on it and from its possessions in Campania. — Theodor Mommsen

Between the shadows of the earth and the dark depths of the sky, human life lay slumbering, with all its unsolved puzzles. — Theodor Storm

But we wish to give the Jews a Homeland. Not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by removing them carefully, roots and all, to a better terrain. — Theodor Herzl

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 character of a people may be ruined by charity. — Theodor Herzl

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

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

I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit among our people. We shall learn from the historic mistakes of others in the same way as we learn from our own; for we are a modern nation and wish to be the most modern in the world. — Theodor Herzl

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. — Theodor Adorno

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews. — 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

Back in those days there was still an unbroken stretch of heath that lay on the route of our excursions, all that was left of a heath that once had extended almost up to the town on the one side and almost to the little village on the other. Here the honeybees and white-gray bumblebees hummed over the fragrant blossoms of heather, and the beautiful gold-green beetles ran among the plants; here in the sweet clouds of the erica and the resinous bushes hovered butterflies that could be found nowhere else on this earth. — Theodor Storm

The secret of great cathedrals is that their proportions conform to cosmic laws, 'shaping' people who spend time in them. — Theodor Schwenk

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