German sociologist & philosopher (1903-1969)
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
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
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
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?
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
In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
There is no love that is not an echo.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
To say "we" and mean "I" is one of the most recondite insults.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, The Apocalyptic Animal of Late Capitalism
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
"Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit"
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?
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
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
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
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?
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
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