Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Theodor Adorno Philosopher

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: Germany
  • Born: Sep 11, 1903
  • Died: Aug 6, 1969

Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society.

He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the work of Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Left.

Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Not only is the self entwined in society it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

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

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Normality is death.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Intelligence is a moral category.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

No emancipation without that of society.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.