Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

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Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

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
Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.

Theodor W. Adorno
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Theodor W. Adorno
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Theodor W. Adorno
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