THEODOR W. ADORNO QUOTES IV

German sociologist & philosopher (1903-1969)

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia

Tags: history


Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia

Tags: language


Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Jargon of Authenticity

Tags: words, language


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?

Tags: philosophy, thought


The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia

Tags: dreams, newspapers


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

Tags: jazz


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

Tags: jazz, music


Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia


Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia

Tags: love, weakness


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

Tags: love, sacrifice


The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Aesthetic Theory


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

Tags: birth, society


The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia

Tags: power, weakness


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

Tags: evil


The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness ... sub-language as superior language.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Jargon of Authenticity

Tags: language


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

Tags: life


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?

Tags: thinking, thought


Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Aesthetic Theory


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

Tags: culture


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

Tags: weakness, mistakes