Best 30 quotes of Theodor W. Adorno on MyQuotes

All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgently needed critique, is garbage.

Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

As the arrangements of life no longer allow time for pleasure conscious of itself, replacing it by the performance of physiological functions, de-inhibited sex is itself de-sexualized. Really, they no longer want ecstasy at all, but merely compensation for an outlay that, best of all, they would like to save as superfluous.

Aufgearbeitet wäre die Vergangenheit erst dann, wenn die Ursachen des Vergangenen beseitigt wären. Nur weil die Ursachen fortbestehen, ward sein Bann bis heute nicht gebrochen.

[Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

But the castration of perception by a court of control that denies it any anticipatory desire, forces it thereby into a pattern of helplessly reiterating what is already known.

Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.

Die Relativität aller Erkenntnis kann immer nur von außen behauptet werden, solange keine bündige Erkenntnis vollzogen wird. Sobald Bewußtsein in eine bestimmte Sache eintritt und deren immanentem Anspruch auf Wahrheit oder Falschheit sich stellt, zergeht die angeblich subjektive Zufälligkeit des Gedankens. Nichtig aber ist der Relativismus darum, weil, was er einerseits für beliebig und zufällig, andererseits für irreduzibel hält, selbst aus der Objektivität - eben der einer individualistischen Gesellschaft - entspringt.

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society.

Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit. (The need to lend a voice to suffering [literally: "to let suffering be eloquent"] is the condition of all truth)

If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure.

If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. He alone loves who has the strength to hold fast to love.

I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time—had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.

In truth, the best works of art are by no means the most perfect ones, but rather those whose imperfection bears the most profound witness to their fundamental contradictions. That is why those works, whose success takes its measure from the failure of the world, assume something helpless, frail and disorganized under the gaze of contemporary cultural administration.

I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.

It would be rash […] to assume that the dwindling of family authority in present society automatically constitutes an element of progress and liberation. On the one hand, the individual’s most productive powers flourish in a living and direct confrontation with his family, and these powers are now deprived of their target, so to speak; on the other hand, the immediately palpable domination of the individual by society, without any intermediary, is so profound that in a deeper layer of its consciousness, the child growing up ‘authorityless’ is probably even more fearful than it ever was in the good old days of the Oedipus complex. It is precisely this side of the situation that is often overlooked by progressive educators.

Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.

Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement.

Perhaps a film which strictly and in all respects satisfied the code of the Hays Office might turn out a great work of art, but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office.

Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.

The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.

The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning

There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence.

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics.