Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

“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.”

“In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for hum...”

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

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

“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 resignat...”

“They [the critics] deal with Schoenbergs early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical clich, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Be...”

“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 rejuve...”

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

“In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.”

“The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge h...”

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

“The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning”

“On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.”

“Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific la...”

“Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self...”

“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...”

“Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.”

“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 o...”

“Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to some...”

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: theyre only animals.”