Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

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.

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

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.

Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.

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

The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Both forms of consciousness, the one that bows before the facts and the other that mistakes itself for an overlord or creator of facts, are like the shattered halves of the truth that was not fulfilled in the world and the failure of which also affects thought. The truth cannot be patched together from its pieces.

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.

To say "we" and mean "I" is one of the most recondite insults.

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.