Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be 'after' something is almost suspect: no help to others in the rat-race is acknowledged unless legitimized by counterclaims.

Often they win sympathy by a certain good-naturedness, a kindly involvement in other people's lives: selflessness as speculation.

A ciência ela própria não tem consciência de si, ela é um instrumento, enquanto o esclarecimento é a filosofia que identifica a verdade ao sistema científico.

The forgotten Spengler will have his revenge by threatening to be right in the end. (...) Spengler has hardly found an opponent worthy of him: collective amnesia provides the escape.

Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of the great historical trend.

All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgently needed critique, is garbage.

Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker.

Total purposelessness gives the lie to the totality of purposefulness in the world of domination, and only by virtue of this negation, which consummates the established order by drawing the conclusion from its own principle of reason, has existing society up to now become aware of another that is possible. The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted charm. Radiance is the appeasement of myth.

Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination.

All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.

Der Zauber geht aufs bloße Tun, aufs Mittel über, kurz, auf die Industrie. Die Formalisierung der Vernunft ist bloß der intellektuelle Ausdruck der maschinellen Produktionsweise. Das Mittel wird fetischisiert: es absorbiert die Lust.

To hate destructiveness one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.

The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such.

The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one's own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell.

All reification is a forgetting'—making available what has passed at once makes it irretrievable. Therein lies the desperate utopia of all musical reproduction: to retrieve the irretrievable through availability. All music-making is a recherche du temps perdu.

Falar de cultura foi sempre contra a cultura. O denominador "cultura" já contém, virtualmente, a tomada de posse, o enquadramento, a classificação que a cultura assume no reino da administração. Só a "administração" industrializada, radical e consequente, é plenamente adequada a esse conceito de cultura.

Wenn aber in Zeiten wie den heutigen die Not am höchsten ist, öffnet sich der Himmel und schleudert sein Feuer auf die, die ohnehin verloren sind.

What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics.

What does it really matter?' is a line we like to associate with bourgeois callousness, but it is the line most likely to make the individual aware, without dread, of the insignificance of his existence. The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one's distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists.

Die zivilisatorische Gesamttendenz der Konstellation von rationalen Mitteln und irrationalen Zwecken

Relativism is an illusion that arises as soon as something is handled according to foreign, transcendental criteria.

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Normality is death.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.