Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.

Theodor W. Adorno
He 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 W. Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Theodor W. Adorno
We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.

Theodor W. Adorno
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

Theodor W. Adorno
Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.

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
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Theodor W. Adorno
In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.

Theodor W. Adorno
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

Theodor W. Adorno
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Theodor W. Adorno
If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.

Theodor W. Adorno
As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

Theodor W. Adorno
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

Theodor W. Adorno
Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

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
Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.

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
Hegel... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. … However,... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?

Theodor W. Adorno
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Theodor W. Adorno
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Theodor W. Adorno
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The jargon of authenticity … is a trademark of societalized chosenness, … sub-language as superior language.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Bourgeois sport [wants] to differentiate itself strictly from play. Its bestial seriousness consists in the fact that instead of reamaining faithful to the dream of freedom by getting away from purposiveness, the treatment of play as a duty puts it among useful purposes and thereby wipes out the trace of freedom in it. This is particularly valid for contemporary mass music. It is only play as a repetition of prescribed models, and the playful release from responsibility which is thereby achieved does not reduce at all the time devoted to duty except by transferring the responsibility to the models, the following of which one makes into a duty for himself.

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
The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

Theodor W. Adorno