261 Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

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 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 idea that after this war life will continue ‘normally’ or even that culture might be ‘rebuilt’ – as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation – is idiotic.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

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.

Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled – even if it insists on being fooled.

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

The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.

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