Theodor Adorno quotes - page 2

Theodor Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, and critical theorist associated with the Frankfurt School. His work explored the intersections of culture, society, and philosophy, and he was a major critic of mass culture and authoritarianism. He profoundly influenced twentieth-century social thought and cultural criticism. Here are 161 of his quotes:

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

Theodor Adorno

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.

Theodor Adorno

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.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.

Theodor Adorno

All the world's not a stage.

Theodor Adorno

In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.

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

A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.

Theodor Adorno

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

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

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Theodor Adorno

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. ... It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

Theodor Adorno

Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there-as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.

Theodor Adorno

When I speak of 'negative dialectics' not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive.

Theodor Adorno

Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature-they would not otherwise uphold privilege.

Theodor Adorno

If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment - twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.

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

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

Theodor Adorno

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

Theodor Adorno

Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him-as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness-just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.

Theodor Adorno