Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.

Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification.

Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen

I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies—preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time—had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.

The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

The glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted charm.

there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning

Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Ich fürchte nicht die Rückkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Faschisten, sondern die Rückkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Demokraten.

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.

The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.

Der Verfall des Schenkens spiegelt sich in der peinlichen Erfindung der Geschenkartikel, die bereits darauf angelegt sind, daß man nicht weiß, was man schenken soll, weil man es eigentlich gar nicht will. Diese Waren sind beziehungslos wie ihre Käufer.

I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.

Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.

There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.

The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.

Nowadays most people kick with the pricks.

The late Franz Borkenau once said, after he had broken with the Communist Party, that he could no longer put up with the practice of discussing municipal regulations in the categories of Hegelian logic, and Hegelian logic in the spirit of meetings of the town council.