Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes “nature” to them.

A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.

The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

Negative Dialektik ... handelt sich um den Entwurf einer Philosophie, die nicht den Begriff der Identität von Sein und Denken voraussetzt und auch nicht in ihm terminiert, sondern die gerade das Gegenteil, also das Auseinanderweisen von Begriff und Sache, von Subjekt und Objekt, und ihre Unversöhntheit, artikulieren will.

Zartheit zwischen Menschen ist nichts anderes als das Bewußtsein von der Möglichkeit zweckfreier Beziehungen.

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 thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. ... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.

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 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.

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

The center of intellectual self-discipline as such is in the process of decomposition. The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check. What is true of the instinctual life is no less of the intellectual: the painter or composer forbidding himself as trite this or that combination of colors or chords, the writer wincing at banal or pedantic verbal configurations, reacts so violently because layers of himself are drawn to them. Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one's finger-tips, so to speak, but at the same time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it. This strength, though manifesting itself as individual resistance, is by no means of a merely individual nature. In the intellectual conscience possessed of it, the social movement is no less present than the moral super-ego. Such conscience grows out of a conception of the good society and its citizens. If this conception dims—and who could still trust blindly in it—the downward urge of the intellect loses its inhibitions and all the detritus dumped in the individual by barbarous culture—half-learning, slackness, heavy familiarity, coarseness—comes to light. Usually it is rationalized as humanity, desire to be understood by others, worldly-wise responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline comes much too easily to him who makes it for us to believe his assurance that it is one.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.