Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

Theodor W. Adorno
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

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
What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

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
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

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
In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. … It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

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
In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

Theodor W. Adorno
The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general.... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.

Theodor W. Adorno
Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Theodor W. Adorno
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

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

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

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

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
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Theodor W. Adorno