261 Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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 what is radically evil.

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

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.

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.

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