"The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength."
|
"All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire."
―Theodor 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."
|
"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
|
"Intelligence is a moral category."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"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."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime."
―Theodor Adorno
|
|
"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it."
|
"Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"The joke of our time is the suicide of intention."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Philosophy must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"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."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction."
―Theodor 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
|
"Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"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."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Dissonance is the truth about harmony."
―Theodor Adorno
|
|
"Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"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 positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"To say"we"and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"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."
―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
|
"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
|
"Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination."
―Theodor Adorno
|
"There is no true life within a false life."
―Theodor Adorno
|
|
