Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

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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
Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it.... The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success.... In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.

Theodor W. Adorno
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

Theodor W. Adorno
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

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 recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Theodor W. Adorno
In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes nature to them.

Theodor W. Adorno
What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

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
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 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
What appears as the positive is essentially the negative, i. e. the thing that is to be criticized.

Theodor W. Adorno
To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

Theodor W. Adorno
The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

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
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

Theodor W. Adorno