Theodor Adorno Quotes

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.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

There is no true life within a false life.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

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

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.

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

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

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

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

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

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.

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.

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

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

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

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

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

The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

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

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.