German sociologist & philosopher (1903-1969)
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Philosophy of Modern Music
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
"Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit"
The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
There is no love that is not an echo.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.
THEODOR ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
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.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
"Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda", The Essential Frankfurt School Reader
In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, The Sociology of Rock
But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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 W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia