German sociologist & philosopher (1903-1969)
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, The Apocalyptic Animal of Late Capitalism
The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Aesthetic Theory
If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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 W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
"Perennial Fashion--Jazz", Prisms
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.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Jazz is the false liquidation of art -- instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, The Sociology of Rock
Triviality is evil -- triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Prisms
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Jargon of Authenticity
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness ... sub-language as superior language.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Jargon of Authenticity
Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Aesthetic Theory
The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia