Theodor Adorno Quotes - Page 6

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Aspiration, Totality, Exclusive

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.79, Verso

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• Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Survival, Different

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.132, MIT Press

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Running, Believe, Risk

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.38, Univ of California Press

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Mean, Sound, Jargon

  Theodor Adorno (2013). “The Jargon of Authenticity”, p.6, Routledge

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Utopia, Abstract, Fulfilled

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.157, Verso

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• Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.

  Theodor Adorno

  Love Is, Ability, Similarity

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Order, Feelings, Culture

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• Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

  Theodor Adorno

  Order, Advice, Helping

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.136, Verso

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• Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Broken, Creation

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• Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

  Theodor Adorno

  Real, One Day, Belief

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• 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.

  Theodor Adorno

  Past, Kitsch, Helping

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.363, Univ of California Press

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• So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

  Theodor Adorno

  Hygiene, Irrelevance, Dying

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.232, Verso

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• If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

  Theodor Adorno

  Moral, Consideration, Parsimony

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.41, Verso

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• Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Numbers, Enlightenment, Doe

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.7, Verso

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• It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

  Theodor Adorno

  Auschwitz

  "How Poetry Can Be Written After Auschwitz" by Billy Mills, www.theguardian.com. January 11, 2011.

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• The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

  Theodor Adorno

  Revenge, Stupidity, Wish

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.122, Verso

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Self, Entwined, Existence

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.154, Verso

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• The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Joy, Culture, Conflict

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.206, Verso

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• The whole is the false.

  Theodor Adorno

  Truth, Whole

  Theodor W. Adorno, Richard D. Leppert (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.35, Univ of California Press

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• When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

  Theodor Adorno

  Molotov Cocktail, People, Trying

  "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950". Book by Martin Jay, p. 279, 1973.

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• Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.

  Theodor Adorno

  Life, Cutting, Luxury

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.119, Verso

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• The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Desire, Usual

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• Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

  Theodor Adorno

  Thinking, Doe, Tasks

  Theodor W. Adorno (2003). “Adorno”, p.6, Psychology Press

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• Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

  Theodor Adorno

  People, Humanity, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (2003). “Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader”, p.89, Stanford University Press

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• The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

  Theodor Adorno

  Blessing, Facts, Doe

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno (2002). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.9, Stanford University Press

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