Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
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.

Theodor W. Adorno
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

Theodor W. Adorno
The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

Theodor W. Adorno
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

Theodor W. Adorno
Music for entertainment... seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.

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

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
It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is the right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly.

Theodor W. Adorno
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

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

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
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

Theodor W. Adorno
The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

Theodor W. Adorno
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The jargon makes it seem that … the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Theodor W. Adorno