Theodor Adorno Quotes
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.
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
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.
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.
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
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.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
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.
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
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.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
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.