Theodor W. Adorno > Quotes

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“People know what they want because they know what other people want.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems

“Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology

“Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. ”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Dissonance is the truth about harmony.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno