German sociologist & philosopher (1903-1969)
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?
In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
"Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit"
In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
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
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
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
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
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
There is no love that is not an echo.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why still Philosophy?
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
To say "we" and mean "I" is one of the most recondite insults.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, The Apocalyptic Animal of Late Capitalism
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?
But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
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
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?