Theodor W. Adorno Short Quotes

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To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Variant: Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Theodor W. Adorno
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Theodor W. Adorno
In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Theodor W. Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Theodor W. Adorno
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

Theodor W. Adorno
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

Theodor W. Adorno
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

Theodor W. Adorno
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

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

Theodor W. Adorno
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

Theodor W. Adorno
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

Theodor W. Adorno