Theodor Adorno Quotes

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

He who integrates is lost.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

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.

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

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.

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

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

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

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.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

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.

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.

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

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.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

There is no true life within a false life.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

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.

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

There is no love that is not an echo.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.