German sociologist & philosopher (1903-1969)
Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Negative Dialectics
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
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
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
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
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
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
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
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I".
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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
In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Philosophy of Modern Music
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?