Theodor Adorno Quotes
-
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.
→ -
Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
→ -
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
→ -
Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
→ -
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
→ -
Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.
→ -
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
→ -
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.
→ -
Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.
→ -
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
→ -
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
→ -
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.
→ -
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
→ -
The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch
→ -
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.
→ -
In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. 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.
→ -
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
→ -
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.
→ -
All the world's not a stage.
→ -
The whole is the false.
→ -
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
→ -
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.
→ -
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
→ -
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
→ -
The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
→ -
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
→ -
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
→ -
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
→ -
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 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.
→
Related Authors
-
Pierre Bourdieu Sociologist -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Philosopher -
Walter Benjamin Literary critic -
Slavoj Žižek Philosopher -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Antonio Gramsci Writer -
Martin Heidegger Philosopher -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Hannah Arendt Philosopher -
Max Weber Sociologist -
-
Jurgen Habermas Philosopher -
Louis Althusser Philosopher -
Jean Baudrillard Philosopher -
Herbert Marcuse Philosopher -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Gyorgy Lukacs Philosopher -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Max Horkheimer Philosopher