Quotes About Adorno

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

Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.

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

The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

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

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.

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

Con respecto a lo negativo, el hecho de que no pueda hacer otra cosa que darle la razón me obliga a un cierto grado de laconismo.

L'idéologie guette l'esprit qui, se réjouissant de lui-même comme le Zarathoustra de Nietzsche, devient irrésistiblement presque un absolu de lui-même. La théorie empêche cela. Elle corrige la naïverté de sa confiance en soi sans qu'il doive pourtant sacrifier la spontanéité à laquelle la théorie pour sa part veut accéder.

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.

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

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

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

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

Following the Beatles, who incidentally were put together by the Tavistock Institute, came other Made in England rock groups, who, like the Beatles, had Theo Adorno write their cult lyrics and compose all the music. I hate to use these beautiful words in the context of Beatlemania; it reminds me of how wrongly the word lover is used when referring to the filthy interaction between two homosexuals writhing in pigswill. To call rock music, is an insult, likewise the language used in rock lyrics.

The classic document in this regard is Adorno's famous F-Scale. The F stands for fascism. Adorno outlined the scale in his 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality. The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression.