Top 100 Theodor Quotes
#1. An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.
David Markson
#2. I was born on August 10, 1913, in Lorenzkirch, a small village in Saxony, as the fourth child of Theodor and Elisabeth Paul, nee Ruppel. All in all, we were six children. Both parents were descendants from Lutheran ministers in several generations.
Wolfgang Paul
#3. The pleasure of thinking - it cannot be recommended." - Theodor W. Adorno
Eric Jarosinski
#4. Take action and be brave Theodor for it is fear and inaction that kills.
Robert Radcliffe
#5. Pleasure principle, a psychoanalytical term coined by Gustav Theodor Fechner, a predecessor of Sigmund Freud
Anonymous
#6. In fact, Guerra based his story on the diaries of two explorers, German Theodor Koch-Grunberg and American Richard Evans Schultes. There work is some of the only documentation of cultures that have since vanished. But Guerra did not want white men to be his protagonists.
Tom Cole
#7. The ways of the Lord," I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant."
"Adler?"
"Theodor Reik, I think.
Robert B. Parker
#8. The secret of great cathedrals is that their proportions conform to cosmic laws, 'shaping' people who spend time in them.
Theodor Schwenk
#9. In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
Theodor Adorno
#10. It goes without saying that the Jewish people can have no other goal than Palestine and that, whatever the fate of the proposition may be, our attitude toward the land of our fathers is and shall remain unchangeable.
Theodor Herzl
#11. The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
Theodor W. Adorno
#12. Statistics are like women; mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like whores to use as one pleases.
Theodor Billroth
#15. If anyone thinks that Jews can steal into the land of their fathers, he is deceiving either himself or others. Nowhere is the coming of Jews so promptly noted as in the historic home of the Jews, for the very reason that it is the historic home.
Theodor Herzl
#16. Dream and deed are not as different as many think. All the deeds of men are dreams at first, and become dreams in the end.
Theodor Herzl
#17. The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Theodor Adorno
#18. 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
#19. The Truth about America's Silicon Valley-
Angels in the Silicon
Riveting and insightful regarding progressivism and the social upheavals living in the Silicon Valley.-
John Yoo, UC Berkeley Constitutional Lawyer, novelist, and public servant
Richard Theodor Kusiolek
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.
Theodor W. Adorno
#23. An independent state does not pay too dear a price for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them; a state which has lost its independence may find at least some compensation in the fact that its protector procures for it peace with its neighbours.
Theodor Mommsen
#24. We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are fugitives from death.
Theodor Reik
#25. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor Adorno
#26. A curse on every wish that blurs the sight, paralyzes the tongue, cramps the hand, and prevents the truth being seen, said, and written.
Theodor Haecker
#27. 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
#28. Women in general want to be loved for what they are and men for what they accomplish.
Theodor Reik
#29. Thus even the most wretched individual breaths like a leaf in a verdant forest. His national identity supported him. A revered history receives him. A legitimate culture accepts his voice into the choir of a great community.
Theodor Lessing
#30. 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
#31. Our age is before all things a practical one. It demands of us all clear and tangible results of our work.
Theodor Svedberg
#32. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor Adorno
#33. True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
#34. The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting.
Theodor Reik
#35. 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
#36. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country ... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
Theodor Herzl
#37. The principal result of my investigation is that a uniform developmental principle controls the individual elementary units of all organisms, analogous to the finding that crystals are formed by the same laws in spite of the diversity of their forms.
Theodor Schwann
#38. 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
#39. Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Theodor W. Adorno
#40. It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor Adorno
#41. Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Theodor Adorno
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Theodor Adorno
#45. When men no longer have the least fear of saying something untrue, they very soon have no fear whatsoever of doing something unjust.
Theodor Haecker
#46. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
#47. 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
#48. Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor W. Adorno
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Sertorius was far from being strong enough to renew the gigantic enterprise of Hannibal. He was lost if he left Spain, where all his successes were bound up with the peculiarities of the country and the people; and even there, he was more and more compelled to renounce the offensive.
Theodor Mommsen
#53. 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
#54. But I am convinced that those Jews who stand aside today with a malicious smile and with their hands in their trousers' pockets will also want to dwell in our beautiful home.
Theodor Herzl
#55. Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
Theodor Adorno
#56. Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Theodor Adorno
#57. When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
Theodor Adorno
#58. In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.
Theodor Reik
#60. The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
Theodor Adorno
#62. 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
#63. The Jews had, as a matter of fact, long been all along the most ingenious entrepreneurs. It was only our own future that we had never built upon a business basis.
Theodor Herzl
#65. Don't sugar-coat results. Don't make yourself look good when your strategy fails. Don't make others look good if their strategy failed.
Theodor Billroth
#66. Our opponents maintain that we are confronted with insurmountable political obstacles, but that may be said of the smallest obstacle if one has no desire to surmount it.
Theodor Herzl
#67. 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
#68. The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
Theodor W. Adorno
#71. Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
Theodor W. Adorno
#72. Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves.
Theodor Reik
#73. The defeat of the Augustan policy, as the peace with Maroboduus and the sufferance of the Teutoburg disaster may well be termed, was hardly a victory of the Germans.
Theodor Mommsen
#74. Economic distress, political pressure, and social obloquy already drive us from our homes and from our graves. The Jews are already constantly shifting from place to place.
Theodor Herzl
#75. 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
#76. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Theodor Adorno
#77. 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
#78. In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Theodor Adorno
#79. The one sure means of dealing with boredom is to care for someone else, to do something kind and good.
Theodor Haecker
#80. The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
Theodor Adorno
#82. Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Theodor Adorno
#83. 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
#84. Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.
Theodor Reik
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.
Carl Theodor Dreyer
#89. But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
Theodor W. Adorno
#90. Against a stupidity that is in fashion, no wisdom compensates.
Theodor Fontane
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor Adorno
#96. The fear to love reaches sometimes the depth of a panic, resembles sometimes the fear to die.
Theodor Reik
#97. 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
#98. Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor W. Adorno
#100. The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you can come back in.
Theodor Reik
