Top 100 Theodor Adorno Quotes
#1. In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
Theodor Adorno
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor Adorno
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor Adorno
#8. True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
#9. 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
#10. It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor Adorno
#11. Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Theodor Adorno
#12. 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
#13. There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.
Theodor Adorno
#14. Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Theodor Adorno
#15. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
Theodor Adorno
#19. People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.
Theodor Adorno
#20. A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.
Theodor Adorno
#21. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
Theodor Adorno
#22. 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
#23. In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Theodor Adorno
#25. Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Theodor Adorno
#26. By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.
Theodor Adorno
#28. 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
#29. In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor Adorno
#31. The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor Adorno
#32. 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
#33. Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
Theodor Adorno
#34. ...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.
Theodor Adorno
#35. When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
Theodor Adorno
#36. 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
#37. But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Theodor Adorno
#38. Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor Adorno
#39. Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
Theodor Adorno
#40. Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor Adorno
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Theodor Adorno
#46. 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
#47. The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
Theodor Adorno
#49. The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Theodor Adorno
#50. The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
Theodor Adorno
#51. Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
Theodor Adorno
#52. Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.
Theodor Adorno
#53. 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
#54. Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.
Theodor Adorno
#55. Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Theodor Adorno
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Theodor Adorno
#59. Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
Theodor Adorno
#61. He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
Theodor Adorno
#62. To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
Theodor Adorno
#63. Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
Theodor Adorno
#65. The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
Theodor Adorno
#66. 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
#67. Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.
Theodor Adorno
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
Theodor Adorno
#73. In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.
Theodor Adorno
#74. 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
#75. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
Theodor Adorno
#76. The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation ... kitsch
Theodor Adorno
#77. In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
Theodor Adorno
#78. In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
Theodor Adorno
#79. Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
#80. The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
Theodor Adorno
#81. 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
#82. Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
Theodor Adorno
#83. History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
#84. Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
Theodor Adorno
#86. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
Theodor Adorno
#88. Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor Adorno
#89. The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy
Theodor Adorno
#90. The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Theodor Adorno
#91. No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Theodor Adorno
#92. The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Theodor Adorno
#93. 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
#94. Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Theodor Adorno
#96. Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
Theodor Adorno
#97. The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
Theodor Adorno
#98. It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.
Theodor Adorno
#99. The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
Theodor Adorno
#100. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
Theodor Adorno
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