Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

Theodor W. Adorno
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

Theodor W. Adorno
Philosophy … should not imagine that specialized work in epistemological theory, or whatever else prides itself on being research, is actually philosophy. Yet a philosophy forswearing all of that must in the end be irreconcilably at odds with the dominant consciousness. Nothing else raises it above the suspicion of apologetics. Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

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
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

Theodor W. Adorno
The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

Theodor W. Adorno
The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

Theodor W. Adorno
The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.

Theodor W. Adorno
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

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

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
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

Theodor W. Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Theodor W. Adorno
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

Theodor W. Adorno
As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

Theodor W. Adorno
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

Theodor W. Adorno