Adorno Quotes

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Quotes About Adorno

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The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. ~ Azar Nafisi
Adorno quotes by Azar Nafisi
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
All the world's not a stage. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Dissonance is the truth about harmony. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
(Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his 'pomposity' and 'oily pathos', ~ Tom Service
Adorno quotes by Tom Service
The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation ... kitsch ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Could you not portray the good sides of life and proclaim love as a principle, instead of endless bitterness?"

There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Nowadays most people kick with the pricks. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Intelligence is a moral category. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply. Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God? ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
No emancipation without that of society. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Folly is truth in the form which men are struck with as amid untruth they will not let truth go. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. ~ Thomas Metzinger
Adorno quotes by Thomas Metzinger
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a new and significant light. Espen took that path, and I followed him like a brainless puppy, it was true, but I did follow him. I leafed through Adorno, read some passages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida and Foucault, had a go at Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze, while poems by Ekelöf, Björling, Pound, Mallarmé, Rilke, Trakl, Ashbery, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen, and Hauge floated around, on which I spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard
Adorno quotes by Karl Ove Knausgaard
You can see likewise that the contradiction involved in the concept of 'salvaging' is not a
simple intellectual contradiction, but a dialectical one. That is to say, it is only possible to rescue ontology in the shape of this dialectical
contradiction, in this pattern in which existence and existent things are mutually interrelated and interdependent - as opposed to an abstract conception of ontology as pure existence standing in absolute opposition to existing beings. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. ~ Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
What it means to be a 'better person', then, must be concrete and practical - that is to say, concerned with people's political situations as a whole - rather than narrowly abstract, concerned only with the immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted from this concrete whole. It must be a question of political and not only of 'moral' argument: that is to say, it must be genuine moral argument, which sees the relations between individual qualities and values and our whole material conditions of existence. Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications. ~ Terry Eagleton
Adorno quotes by Terry Eagleton
On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by 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 Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon. There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military manners. Now, as earlier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's. She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
There is no love that is not an echo. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by 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
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
One should never begrudge deletions. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by 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
Adorno quotes by 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 Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
There can be no poetry after Auschwitz. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor 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 Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Whereas the unconscious colossus of real existence, subjectless capitalism, inflicts its destruction blindly, the deludedly rebellious subject is willing to see that destruction as its fulfillment, and, together with the biting cold it emits toward human beings misused as things, it also radiates the perverted love which, in the world of things, takes the place of love in its immediacy. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies - preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time - had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Normality is death. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
It is up to the school more than anything else to work against barbarism. ... By barbarism, I do not mean the Beatles. ~ T. W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by T. 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 Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music. It is then a supreme irony that traces of this same fetishizing procedure can be found in Adorno's own writings. Many of his provocative one-liners do effectively capture a profound insight or at least touch on a crucial point (for example: "Nothing is more true in pscyhoanalysis than its exaggeration"); however, more often than his partisans are ready to admit, Adorno gets caught up in his own game, infatuated with his own ability to produce dazzlingly "effective" paradoxical aphorisms at the expense of theoretical substance (recall the famous line from Dialectic of Englightment on how Hollywood's ideological maniuplation of social reality realized Kant's idea of the transcendental constitution of reality). In such cases where the dazzling "effect" of the unexpected short-circuit (here between Hollywood cinema and Kantian ontology) effectively overshadows the theoretical line of argumentation, the brilliant paradox works precisely in the same manner as the Wagnerian leitmotif: instead of serving as a nodal point in the complex n ~ Slavoj Zizek
Adorno quotes by Slavoj Zizek
The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
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. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. ~ Theodore Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodore Adorno
The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Life has become the ideology of its own absence. ~ Theodor Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor Adorno
Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves. ~ Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno quotes by Theodor W. Adorno
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