theodor w. adorno

“But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.”

“Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.”

“The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.”

“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”

“Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.”

“Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?”

“Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.”

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”

“Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself.”

“One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.”

“Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.”

“In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.”

“There is no right life in the wrong one.”

“Dissonance is the truth about harmony.”

“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.”

“Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.”

“They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.”

“Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.”

“Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.”

“Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.”

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty,nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against suchawareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.”

“Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.”

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

“It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.”

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

“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”

“freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”