Theodor Adorno Quotes

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

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.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

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.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

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.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

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.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

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.

The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

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.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

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.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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.

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

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.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.