Quotes from Theodor Adorno

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.

...the beautiful in nature is like a spark flashing momentarily and disappearing as soon as one tries to get hold of it.

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.

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.

On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.