Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 5

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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.

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

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.

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

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

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.

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

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

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

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. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

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

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

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