Quotes from Theodor Adorno

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.

Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.

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.

Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil.

The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.

If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.

Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labor markets and to heighten to commodity value of the personality.

Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.

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

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being true.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.

The practical orders of life, while purporting to benefit man, serve in a profit economy to stunt human qualities, and the further they spread the more they sever everything tender.

It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes the cover for something low. That is how potential victims are kept in line.

In professional groups which, as they say, carry on intellectual work, but are at the same time employed, dependent or economically weak, the jargon in a professional illness

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.