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Theodor Adorno Quotes

1903–1969 Germany

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist, Marxist and composer.

Germany
Academics
Composers
Essayists
Philosophers

Also known as: Adorno, Adorno, Theodor, Theodor W Adorno, Theodor W. Adorno

Random Theodor Adorno quote

66 quotes

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Minima Moralia (1951)

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (1959)

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

The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract.

The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.

On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938)

Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity (1964)

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity (1964)

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Cultural Criticism and Society (1949)

Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.

Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy? (1963)

In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.

Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy? (1963)

The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.

Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity (1964)

Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.

On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938)

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.

Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. 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.

Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events.

Minima Moralia (1951)

Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.

On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Theodor Adorno (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.