Theodor Adorno Quotes

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

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

The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

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

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

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.

The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.

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

Normality is death.

The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

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

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

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

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

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

The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.

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.

Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

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

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.

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

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

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

The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

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

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

The whole is the false.

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

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

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.

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.

The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.

Intelligence is a moral category.

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

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.

No emancipation without that of society.

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

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation ... kitsch

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

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

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

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

Kitsch parodies catharsis ... It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts ...

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

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

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

All the world's not a stage.

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.

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

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

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.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

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.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

There is something embarrassing in ... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

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.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

He who integrates is lost.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.