Theodor Adorno Quotes

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated,
nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

There is no love that is not an echo.

Knowledge,
which is power,
knows no limits,
either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

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

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves,
the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are.
Immovably,
they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.
The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

Art respects the masses,
by standing up to them for what they could be,
rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

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

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

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.

In the end,
glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

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.

In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members,
or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way,
through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other.
It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

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

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

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

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

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal,
and with them men.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.
The promissory note which,
with its plots and staging,
it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged;
the promise,
which is actually all the spectacle consists of,
is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached,
that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants.
To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it,
but is in it.

On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning.
The concept is replaced by the formula,
the cause by rules and probability.

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

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

The invocation of science,
of its ground rules,
of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become,
now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free,
uncoddled,
undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned.
Science and scholarship,
the medium of autonomy,
has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

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.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment,
as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

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

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

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

An emancipated society,
on the other hand,
would not be a unitary state,
but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.