99+ Theodor W. Adorno Quotes on Animal cruelty, Hypocrisy and Jazz - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Theodor W. Adorno quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Theodor W. Adorno quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Theodor W. Adorno wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Animal cruelty, Hypocrisy and Jazz

But the castration of perception by a court of control that denies it any anticipatory desire, forces it thereby into a pattern of helplessly reiterating what is already known.

The subjectivist approach to art simply fails to understand that the subjective experience of art in itself is meaningless, and that in order to grasp the importance of art one has to zero in on the artistic object rather than on the fun of the art lover.

The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape. For mythology had reflected in its forms the essence of the existing order – cyclical motion, fate, domination of the world as truth – and had renounced hope.

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

Nothing, for us, can fill the place of undiminished brightness except the unconscious dark; nothing that of what once we might have been, except the dream that we had never been born.

Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement.

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society.

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

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

The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.

Folly is truth in the form which men are struck with as amid untruth they will not let truth go.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

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-destructive.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

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 someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’.

There’s not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

Whereas the unconscious colossus of real existence, subjectless capitalism, inflicts its destruction blindly, the deludedly rebellious subject is willing to see that destruction as its fulfillment, and, together with the biting cold it emits toward human beings misused as things, it also radiates the perverted love which, in the world of things, takes the place of love in its immediacy.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.

Ever since Plato, bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objective antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out mean always conceals the antinomy and is torn apart by it.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.

I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.

The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.

The taboos that constitute a man’s intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

Strong Quotes

If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure.

I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.

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

A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words ‘how beautiful’.

In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

1
2
3
4
5