Theodor Adorno Quotes
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
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.
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
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.
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
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.
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.
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
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.
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.