Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"No emancipation without that of society."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Life has become the ideology of its own absence."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at every level. The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master morality."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Horror is beyond the reach of psychology."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"It is not man's lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"If the integration of society, particularly in totalitarian states, designates subjects more and more exclusively as partial moments in the network of material production, then the 'alteration of the technical composition of capital' is prolonged within those encompassed, and indeed constituted, by the technological demands of the production process. The organic composition of man is growing. That which determines subjects as means of production and not as living purposes, increases with the proportion of machines to variable capital."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"He who integrates is lost."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Metaphysical categories are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about, and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"There is no love that is not an echo."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Intelligence is a moral category."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"The intellectuals themselves are already so heavily committed to what is endorsed in their isolated sphere, that they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."
Adorno, Theodor and E. F. N. Jephcott (Translator). Minima Moralia. 1951.
"Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself."
Adorno, Theodor and E. B. Ashton (Translator). Negative Dialectics. 1966.
"If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true — if it is to be true today, in any case — it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims."
Adorno, Theodor and E. B. Ashton (Translator). Negative Dialectics. 1966.
"Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it."
Adorno, Theodor and Robert Hullot-Kentor (Translator). Aesthetic Theory. 1970.
"The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art."
Adorno, Theodor and Robert Hullot-Kentor (Translator). Aesthetic Theory. 1970.
"The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics."
Adorno Theodor and Horkheimer, Max and Edmund Jephcott (Translator). Dialectic of the Enlightenment. 1944.
"The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic."
Adorno, Theodor and Anson G. Rabinbach (Translator). Culture Industry Reconsidered. 1963.
"The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all."
Adorno, Theodor and Anson G. Rabinbach (Translator). Culture Industry Reconsidered. 1963.
"The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives."
Adorno, Theodor and Anson G. Rabinbach (Translator). Culture Industry Reconsidered. 1963.
"The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic."
Adorno, Theodor and Anson G. Rabinbach (Translator). Culture Industry Reconsidered. 1963.
"Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed."
Adorno, Theodor and J. M. Bernstein (Translator). The Culture Industry. 1981.
" Hegel must be read against the grain, and in such a way that every logical operation, however formal it seems to be, is reduced to its experiential core."
Adorno, Theodor and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Translator). Hegel: Three Studies. 1963.
