German sociologist & philosopher (1903-1969)
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.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Negative Dialectics
In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Why Still Philosophy?
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Both forms of consciousness, the one that bows before the facts and the other that mistakes itself for an overlord or creator of facts, are like the shattered halves of the truth that was not fulfilled in the world and the failure of which also affects thought. The truth cannot be patched together from its pieces.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
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.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
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.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Philosophy of Modern Music
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, The Sociology of Rock