Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

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In both positivism and Heidegger—at least in his later work—speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.

Theodor W. Adorno
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Theodor W. Adorno
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

Theodor W. Adorno
Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness.

Theodor W. Adorno
The conflicts that tear society apart resemble the distinction between the concept and the particular facts subordinated to it.... Whatever refuses to abide by the unity imposed by the principle of dominion manifests itself not as something indifferent to that principle, but as an infringement of logic: as a contradiction.

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 importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic.

Theodor W. Adorno
Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.

Theodor W. Adorno
In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

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
Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

Theodor W. Adorno
Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

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
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
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

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
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

Theodor W. Adorno
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
… to promote precisely that manner of intellectual freedom that has no place in the regnant philosophical movements.

Theodor W. Adorno
If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. … It is incumbent upon philosophy … to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

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
So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

Theodor W. Adorno