Theodor Adorno Quotes

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.

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

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

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

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.

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

People know what they want because they know what other people want.

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

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

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

There is no love that is not an echo.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

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

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

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.

He who integrates is lost.