Theodor Adorno Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Theodor Adorno on Wise Famous Quotes.
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
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.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.
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.
Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.