Top 59 Theodor W. Adorno Quotes
#1. The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
Theodor W. Adorno
#2. A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.
Theodor W. Adorno
#3. Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Theodor W. Adorno
#4. Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor W. Adorno
#5. 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
#6. 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
#9. The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
Theodor W. Adorno
#11. Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
Theodor W. Adorno
#12. A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.
Theodor W. Adorno
#13. But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
Theodor W. Adorno
#15. Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor W. Adorno
#16. There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.
Theodor W. Adorno
#17. 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
#18. The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.
Theodor W. Adorno
#19. In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
Theodor W. Adorno
#20. On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
Theodor W. Adorno
#21. Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
Theodor W. Adorno
#22. Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
Theodor W. Adorno
#24. The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor W. Adorno
#28. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.
Theodor W. Adorno
#29. Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
Theodor W. Adorno
#30. 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
#31. Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.
Theodor W. Adorno
#34. Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.
Theodor W. Adorno
#36. 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
#37. Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labor markets and to heighten to commodity value of the personality.
Theodor W. Adorno
#38. The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.
Theodor W. Adorno
#39. People know what they want because they know what other people want.
Theodor W. Adorno
#41. ...there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.
Theodor W. Adorno
#43. 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
#45. If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Theodor W. Adorno
#46. 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
#47. Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Theodor W. Adorno
#48. The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
Theodor W. Adorno
#49. The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.
Theodor W. Adorno
#51. 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
#52. In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
Theodor W. Adorno
#54. The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity
Theodor W. Adorno
#55. Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
Theodor W. Adorno
#56. Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
Theodor W. Adorno
#57. Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
Theodor W. Adorno
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