Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

Nothing, for us, can fill the place of undiminished brightness except the unconscious dark; nothing that of what once we might have been, except the dream that we had never been born.

One should never begrudge deletions.

The subjectivist approach to art simply fails to understand that the subjective experience of art in itself is meaningless, and that in order to grasp the importance of art one has to zero in on the artistic object rather than on the fun of the art lover.

Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.

in the antagonistic society, the relationship of the generations is also one of competition, behind which stands naked violence.

What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.

Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit. (The need to lend a voice to suffering [literally: "to let suffering be eloquent"] is the condition of all truth)

Ever since Plato, bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objective antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out mean always conceals the antinomy and is torn apart by it.

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As the arrangements of life no longer allow time for pleasure conscious of itself, replacing it by the performance of physiological functions, de-inhibited sex is itself de-sexualized. Really, they no longer want ecstasy at all, but merely compensation for an outlay that, best of all, they would like to save as superfluous.

If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure.

Die fast unlösbare Aufgabe besteht darin, weder von der Macht der anderen, noch von der eigenen Ohnmacht sich dumm machen zu lassen.

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society.

Der Versuch, dem objektiven Gehalt Bachs zu seinem Recht zu verhelfen, indem man die subjektive Anstrengung bloß daran wendet, das Subjekt auszumerzen, überschlägt sich. Objektivität bleibt nicht als Rest der Substraktion des Subjekts zurück.

Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

Whereas the unconscious colossus of real existence, subjectless capitalism, inflicts its destruction blindly, the deludedly rebellious subject is willing to see that destruction as its fulfillment, and, together with the biting cold it emits toward human beings misused as things, it also radiates the perverted love which, in the world of things, takes the place of love in its immediacy.

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity.

Could you not portray the good sides of life and proclaim love as a principle, instead of endless bitterness?" There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence.

It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

Perhaps a film which strictly and in all respects satisfied the code of the Hays Office might turn out a great work of art, but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office.

Folly is truth in the form which men are struck with as amid untruth they will not let truth go.

The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.