Quotations from

Theodor W. Adorno

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Picture of Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno (; German: [ˈteːodoːɐ̯ aˈdɔʁno] ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, cultural theorist, and music critic. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and G. W. F. Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, he authored numerous works—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951), and Negative Dialectics (1966)—that strongly influenced the European New Left.

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Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

There is no love that is not an echo.

—Theodor W. Adorno

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

—Theodor W. Adorno

The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the… sanatorium director and the… propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a direct line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

—Theodor W. Adorno