Theodor Adorno was born on September 11, 1903 in Germany. In 1924, he received his Philosophy degree from the Univeristy of Frankfurt. He joined the University of Frankfurt and taught Philosophy.
During the Nazi domination, Adorno left Germany and moved to England, and afterwards to the United States. Following the end of the war, Adorno took the position as director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1956 until his death in 1969.
Theodor Adorno was influenced by philosphers such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx. He has been a poignant obrserver of human sufferings and how the modern society has failed its citizens.
German Authors who marked the the 20th Century
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From cultural and social identity to globalization, to the cultural industry, Adorno has mainly written on topics which are so much in discussion in our era. Furthermore, he coined the term “identity thinking” to describe how categorical thinking was taking over our society and behaviour where the other is dominated and controlled by the Subject and such kind of intrumental reason led to violence and atrocities of National Socialism.
Theodor Adorno published various works such as In Search of Wagner, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, Minima Moralia, Dialectic of Enlightenment and Towards a New Manifesto.
He died of a heart attack on August 6, 1969 in Switzerland.
Go through our Theodor Adorno Quotes and learn more about this thoughts and words about about technology, Culture, Society and the Self.
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor Adorno
No emancipation without that of society.
Theodor Adorno
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Theodor Adorno
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
Theodor Adorno
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor Adorno
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor Adorno
Normality is death.
Theodor Adorno
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor Adorno
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Theodor Adorno
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Theodor Adorno
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
Theodor Adorno
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
Theodor Adorno
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
Theodor Adorno
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
Theodor Adorno
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
Theodor Adorno
Intelligence is a moral category.
Theodor Adorno
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Theodor Adorno
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
Theodor Adorno
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
Theodor Adorno
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Theodor Adorno
The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.
Theodor Adorno
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
Theodor Adorno
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
Theodor Adorno
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Theodor Adorno
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Theodor Adorno
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Theodor Adorno
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
Theodor Adorno
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
Theodor Adorno
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
Theodor Adorno
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
Theodor Adorno
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Theodor Adorno
In the age of the individual’s liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
Theodor Adorno
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
Theodor Adorno
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Theodor Adorno
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
Theodor Adorno
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
Theodor Adorno
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor Adorno
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Theodor Adorno
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Theodor Adorno
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Theodor Adorno
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Theodor Adorno
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
Theodor Adorno
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor Adorno
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Theodor Adorno
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
Theodor Adorno
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Theodor Adorno
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.
Theodor Adorno
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
Theodor Adorno
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
Theodor Adorno
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
Theodor Adorno
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Theodor Adorno
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
Theodor Adorno
In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’.
Theodor Adorno
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Theodor Adorno
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one’s own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
Theodor Adorno
Fascism is itself less ‘ideological’, in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Theodor Adorno
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Theodor Adorno
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor Adorno
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
Theodor Adorno
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
Theodor Adorno
He who integrates is lost.
Theodor Adorno
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
Theodor Adorno
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
Theodor Adorno
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
Theodor Adorno
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Theodor Adorno
There is no love that is not an echo.
Theodor Adorno
The whole is the false.
Theodor Adorno
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Theodor Adorno
To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.
Theodor Adorno
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
Theodor Adorno
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
Theodor Adorno
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
Theodor Adorno
Work while you work, play while you play – this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor Adorno
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
Theodor Adorno