Theodor Adorno Quotes

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

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.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

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.

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.