Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods. For in the world of commodities this realm appears to be exempted from the power of exchange, to be in an immediate relationship with the goods, and it is this appearance in turn which alone gives cultural goods their exchange-value. But they nevertheless simultaneously fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market.

Theodor W. Adorno
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
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 W. Adorno
Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
The 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 W. Adorno
Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

Theodor W. Adorno
Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him—as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness—just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.

Theodor W. Adorno
The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.

Theodor W. Adorno
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

Theodor W. Adorno
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

Theodor W. Adorno
Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive.... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
When I speak of 'negative dialectics' not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive.

Theodor W. Adorno
In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Theodor W. Adorno