Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

Theodor W. Adorno
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Theodor W. Adorno
The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

Theodor W. Adorno
The concept of positivity in itself, in abstracto, has become part and parcel of the ideology today.... Critique has started to become suspect, regardless of its content.

Theodor W. Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Theodor W. Adorno
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Everybody 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 W. Adorno
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

Theodor W. Adorno
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

Theodor W. Adorno
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

Theodor W. Adorno
Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.

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

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
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

Theodor W. Adorno
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

Theodor W. Adorno
Indeed, 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 W. Adorno
The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.

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

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
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

Theodor W. Adorno