Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 3

In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. 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.

There is no true life within a false life.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

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

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.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

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

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

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

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

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

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

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

All the world's not a stage.