Theodor adorno quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

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.

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

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.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

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

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

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. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

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

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

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

There is no love that is not an echo.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

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

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

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.

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.

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

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

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

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

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

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

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

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

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

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 poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

There is no true life within a false life.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

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.

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

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.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

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

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.

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.

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

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

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

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.

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

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz 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.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

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

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

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

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

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

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Intelligence is a moral category.

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

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

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

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

He who integrates is lost.

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

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

All the world's not a stage.

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

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

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

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

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

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