261 Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

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

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.

Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.

In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object.

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.

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

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.

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

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.