261 Quotes by Theodor W. Adorno

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.

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.

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.

Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

Насилие, учиняемое над людьми массовой музыкой, продолжает жить и на другом социальном полюсе, в музыке, избегающей людей

Совет, что художникам лучше бы следовало не так много думать - а ведь всякая свобода безусловно приводит их к размышлению, - не более чем адаптированный и выпотрошенный массовой культурой траур по утраченной наивности.

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

The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him.

They are official sinners but privately repentants. At the present stage of our society even the relation between sin and repentance may have undergone a fundamental change and may be the opposite of what it used to be formerly.