Top 100 Adorno Quotes
#1. An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.
David Markson
#2. (Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos',
Tom Service
#3. The pleasure of thinking - it cannot be recommended." - Theodor W. Adorno
Eric Jarosinski
#4. Refusing what Adorno called that 'comfort in the uncomfortable' taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe.
Michael Richardson
#5. Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.
Thomas Metzinger
#6. In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
Theodor Adorno
#7. The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
Theodor W. Adorno
#9. The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Theodor Adorno
#10. 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
#11. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
Theodor Adorno
#12. 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
#13. A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.
Theodor W. Adorno
#14. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor Adorno
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.
Theodore Adorno
#18. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor Adorno
#19. True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
#20. 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
#21. Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Theodor W. Adorno
#22. It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor Adorno
#23. Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Theodor Adorno
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Theodor Adorno
#27. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
#28. 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
#29. Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor W. Adorno
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
Theodor Adorno
#35. Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Theodor Adorno
#36. When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
Theodor Adorno
#38. The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
Theodor Adorno
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
Theodor W. Adorno
#44. Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
Theodor W. Adorno
#45. 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
#46. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Theodor Adorno
#47. 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
#48. In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Theodor Adorno
#49. The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
Theodor Adorno
#51. Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Theodor Adorno
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
Theodor W. Adorno
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor Adorno
#61. In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
Theodor Adorno
#62. Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor W. Adorno
#65. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer
#66. The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor Adorno
#67. The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
Theodor Adorno
#68. All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Theodor Adorno
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. ...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.
Theodor Adorno
#73. When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
Theodor Adorno
#74. 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
#75. In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
Theodor Adorno
#76. But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Theodor Adorno
#77. There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.
Theodor W. Adorno
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.
Theodor Adorno
#82. In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.
Theodor W. Adorno
#83. In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
Theodor Adorno
#84. 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
#85. Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor Adorno
#86. What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.
Theodor Adorno
#87. Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
Theodor W. Adorno
#88. The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
Theodor Adorno
#89. Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
Theodor Adorno
#90. Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor Adorno
#91. Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
Theodor W. Adorno
#94. There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.
Theodor Adorno
#95. The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor W. Adorno
#98. 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
#99. If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
Theodor Adorno
#100. 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
