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.
| 38 quotes | 2,013 visits |
Quotations
| • | The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong. 11 |
| • | Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. 8 |
| • | Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. 7 |
| • | Mysticism is the metaphysics of idiots. 6 |
| • | Intelligence is a moral category. 4 |
| • | Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage. 4 |
| • | Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength. 4 |
| • | The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness. 4 |
| • | The tendency for mysticism is a symptom of arrested development. 3 |
| • | Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces. 3 |
| • | The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. 2 |
| • | The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners. 1 |
| • | Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture. 1 |
| • | The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points. 1 |
| • | A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject. 1 |
| • | Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. 1 |
| • | The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. 1 |
| • | The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. 1 |
| • | In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. 1 |
| • | History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it. 1 |
| • | When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality. 1 |
| • | Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. 1 |
| • | Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. 1 |
| • | The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves. 1 |
| • | There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society. 1 |
| • | He who integrates is lost. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. 1 |
| • | If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy. 1 |
| • | Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. 1 |
| • | People know what they want because they know what other people want. 1 |
| • | The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available. 1 |
| • | Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. 1 |
| • | The bourgeois is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be. 1 |
| • | Wrong life cannot be lived rightly. 1 |
| • | Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. 1 |
