A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
-- Theodor Adorno
When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed.
-- Theodor Adorno
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
-- Theodor Adorno
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
-- Theodor Adorno
All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at every level. The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master morality.
-- Theodor Adorno
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
-- Theodor Adorno
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
-- Theodor Adorno
And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
-- Theodor Adorno
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
-- Theodor Adorno
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
-- Theodor Adorno
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
-- Theodor Adorno
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
-- Theodor Adorno
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
-- Theodor Adorno
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
-- Theodor Adorno
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
-- Theodor Adorno
Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through consequential logic becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and freezes.
-- Theodor Adorno
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
-- Theodor Adorno
Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
-- Theodor Adorno
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
-- Theodor Adorno
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. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter.
-- Theodor Adorno
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
-- Theodor Adorno
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
-- Theodor Adorno
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
-- Theodor Adorno
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
-- Theodor Adorno
Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish.
-- Theodor Adorno
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
-- Theodor Adorno
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
-- Theodor Adorno
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
-- Theodor Adorno
He who integrates is lost.
-- Theodor Adorno
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
-- Theodor Adorno
He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.
-- Theodor 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.
-- Theodor Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
-- Theodor Adorno
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
-- Theodor Adorno
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
-- Theodor Adorno
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.
-- Theodor Adorno
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
-- Theodor Adorno
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
-- Theodor Adorno
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
-- Theodor Adorno
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
-- Theodor Adorno
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
-- Theodor Adorno
In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence.
-- Theodor Adorno
In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them.
-- Theodor Adorno
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
-- Theodor Adorno
In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
-- Theodor Adorno
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
-- Theodor Adorno
Intelligence is a moral category.
-- Theodor Adorno
It is not man's lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity.
-- Theodor Adorno
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
-- Theodor Adorno
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
-- Theodor Adorno
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
-- Theodor Adorno
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
-- Theodor Adorno
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
-- Theodor Adorno
Metaphysical categories are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about, and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences.
-- Theodor Adorno
Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element.
-- Theodor Adorno
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
-- Theodor Adorno
No emancipation without that of society.
-- Theodor Adorno
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
-- Theodor Adorno
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
-- Theodor Adorno
Normality is death.
-- Theodor Adorno
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
-- Theodor Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
-- Theodor Adorno
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
-- Theodor Adorno
People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.
-- Theodor Adorno
Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.
-- Theodor Adorno
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
-- Theodor Adorno
Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.
-- Theodor Adorno
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
-- Theodor Adorno
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.
-- Theodor Adorno
Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.
-- Theodor Adorno
Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs.
-- Theodor Adorno
Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian rule. Its organization also embraces those at war with it by co-ordinating their consciousness to its own.
-- Theodor Adorno
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
-- Theodor Adorno
Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.
-- Theodor Adorno
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
-- Theodor Adorno
That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.
-- Theodor Adorno
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
-- Theodor Adorno
The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror.
-- Theodor Adorno
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.
-- Theodor Adorno
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
-- Theodor Adorno
The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.
-- Theodor Adorno
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
-- Theodor Adorno
The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere exceptions, should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its own untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself become an object of thought, instead of guiding it.
-- Theodor Adorno
The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.
-- Theodor Adorno
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
-- Theodor Adorno
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
-- Theodor Adorno
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
-- Theodor Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
-- Theodor Adorno
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
-- Theodor Adorno
The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.
-- Theodor Adorno
The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as simple antitheses is false, among other reasons, in overlooking the moment of enlightenment in the genesis of beauty. Enlightenment does not merely dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of beauty in the first place.
-- Theodor Adorno
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
-- Theodor Adorno
The intellectuals themselves are already so heavily committed to what is endorsed in their isolated sphere, that they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag.
-- Theodor Adorno
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
-- Theodor Adorno
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.
-- Theodor Adorno
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
-- Theodor Adorno
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.
-- Theodor Adorno
The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
-- Theodor Adorno
The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interest, both freely accepted mutual responsibility.
-- Theodor Adorno
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.
-- Theodor Adorno
The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the ascertainment of the truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity.
-- Theodor Adorno
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
-- Theodor Adorno
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
-- Theodor Adorno
The scientific industry has its exact counterpart in the kind of minds it harnesses: they no longer need to do themselves any violence in becoming their own voluntary and zealous overseers. Even if they show themselves, outside their official capacity, to be quite human and sensible being, they are paralysed by pathic stupidity the moment they begin to think professionally.
-- Theodor Adorno
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
-- Theodor Adorno
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
-- Theodor Adorno
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
-- Theodor Adorno
The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.
-- Theodor Adorno
The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.
-- Theodor Adorno
The whole is the false.
-- Theodor Adorno
The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honour to think of it entirely as a system; for its unifying principle is division, and it reconciles by asserting unimpaired the irreconcilability of the general and the particular.
-- Theodor Adorno
There is no love that is not an echo.
-- Theodor Adorno
There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of rationally improved production and communications, and a modestly raised standard of living.
-- Theodor Adorno
They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their hind-legs.
-- Theodor Adorno
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
-- Theodor Adorno
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
-- Theodor Adorno
To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.
-- Theodor Adorno
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
-- Theodor Adorno
Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be 'after' something is almost suspect.
-- Theodor Adorno
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
-- Theodor Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
-- Theodor Adorno
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
-- Theodor Adorno
Up to our days a man's membership of the upper or lower classes has been crudely determined by whether or not he accepted money. At times false pride became conscious criticism.
-- Theodor Adorno
We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless.
-- Theodor Adorno
What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.
-- Theodor Adorno
Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependants: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child.
-- Theodor Adorno
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
-- Theodor Adorno
Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized.
-- Theodor Adorno
When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed.
-- Theodor Adorno
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
-- Theodor Adorno
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
-- Theodor Adorno
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
-- Theodor Adorno
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