Quotes by
Theodore Adorno |
1903-1969 , German philosopher
Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society.He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. For those thinkers, the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society.
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Quotations
| • | The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong. 10 |
| • | Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. 7 |
| • | Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. 6 |
| • | Mysticism is the metaphysics of idiots. 5 |
| • | The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness. 3 |
| • | Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength. 3 |
| • | Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage. 3 |
| • | Intelligence is a moral category. 3 |
| • | Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces. 2 |
| • | The tendency for mysticism is a symptom of arrested development. 2 |
| • | Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. |
| • | Wrong life cannot be lived rightly. |
| • | The bourgeois is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be. |
| • | Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. |
| • | The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available. |
| • | People know what they want because they know what other people want. |
| • | Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. |
| • | If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. |
| • | He who integrates is lost. |
| • | There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society. |
| • | The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves. |
| • | Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. |
| • | Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. |
| • | When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality. |
| • | History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it. |
| • | In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. |
| • | The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. |
| • | The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. |
| • | Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. |
| • | The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject. |
| • | 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. |
| • | A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself. |
| • | The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points. |
| • | Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture. |
| • | The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners. |
