Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
Theodor AdornoHe who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
Theodor AdornoKitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.
Theodor AdornoFascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Theodor AdornoEverybody 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 AdornoQuality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Theodor AdornoIndeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.
Theodor AdornoThe need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
Theodor AdornoThere is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.
Theodor AdornoFreud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.
Theodor AdornoAuschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Theodor AdornoThe poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Theodor AdornoCultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
Theodor AdornoThe culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
Theodor AdornoIn 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 AdornoEverything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
Theodor AdornoWork while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor AdornoThe darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor AdornoFear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Theodor AdornoThe power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
Theodor AdornoHe who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.
Theodor AdornoEven the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
Theodor AdornoAll satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Theodor AdornoNone of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor AdornoDeath is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
Theodor AdornoIn the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor AdornoThe 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 AdornoThe human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Theodor AdornoDialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor AdornoThought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.
Theodor AdornoHe who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
Theodor Adorno