Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 2

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

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

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.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.

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

The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

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.

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 aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.