Theodor Adorno

The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

— Theodor Adorno

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

— Theodor Adorno

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

— Theodor Adorno

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded…

— Theodor Adorno

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

— Theodor Adorno

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology…

— Theodor Adorno

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

— Theodor Adorno

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

— Theodor Adorno

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which…

— Theodor Adorno

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to…

— Theodor Adorno

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things…

— Theodor Adorno

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the…

— 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…

— Theodor Adorno

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is…

— Theodor Adorno

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress…

— Theodor Adorno

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In…

— Theodor Adorno

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance…

— Theodor Adorno

Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

— 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

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

— Theodor Adorno

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a…

— Theodor Adorno

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

— Theodor Adorno

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

— Theodor Adorno

On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules…

— Theodor Adorno

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

— Theodor Adorno

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

— Theodor Adorno

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

— Theodor Adorno

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing…

— Theodor Adorno

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

— Theodor Adorno

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if…

— Theodor Adorno

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

— Theodor Adorno

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

— Theodor Adorno

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

— Theodor Adorno

The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

— Theodor Adorno

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they…

— 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

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

— Theodor Adorno

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

— Theodor Adorno

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

— Theodor Adorno

It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

— Theodor Adorno