Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

—Theodor W. Adorno

About Theodor W. Adorno

Portrait 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, 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...

More quotations from 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

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

—Theodor W. Adorno

love similarity

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

—Theodor W. Adorno

love strength weakness vulnerability

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

—Theodor W. Adorno

art chaos order

More quotations tagged with “crime”

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

humor cynicism law crime

The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.

—Mignon McLaughlin

heart crime head

Punishment is directed primarily at the potentially guilty.

—Michel Foucault

justice morality crime punishment

As one reads history… one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

history crime cruelty punishment community

It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond this one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy,… or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide who exactly is stealing from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit.

—Abbie Hoffman

ownership morality crime theft

History

22 May 2016 Added