Skip to content

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

— Theodor Adorno Minima Moralia (1951)

Kunst ist Magie, befreit von der Lüge, Wahrheit zu sein.

Original text (German)

Another quote →

Topics

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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

The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

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)

All Theodor Adorno quotes →

You may also like

You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Theodor Adorno (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.