Theodor Adorno Quotations

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

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

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

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. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

There is no love that is not an echo.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

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.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

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

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

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

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

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

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

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

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

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.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

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

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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

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.

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

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: theyre only animals.

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

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

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.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

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

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.

Intelligence is a moral category.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts...

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

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.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.