Top 133 Quotes & Sayings 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.

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

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

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

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

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

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

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.

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.

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 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 positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

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.

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 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.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

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

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

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.

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 usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

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

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

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.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

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

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

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.

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

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

All the world's not a stage.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

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.

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.

There is no true life within a false life.

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.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.