Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

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 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
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility.

Theodor W. Adorno
In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind— Geist —was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.

Theodor W. Adorno
In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

Theodor W. Adorno
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Theodor W. Adorno
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Theodor W. Adorno
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Theodor W. Adorno
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Theodor W. Adorno
Philosophy … must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

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

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
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 thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

Theodor W. Adorno
Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

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