Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno
Theodor W. Adornowas a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth11 September 1903
CountryGermany
past betrayed doe
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
past expression torment
The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
memories past leftovers
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
past kitsch helping
Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.
past catastrophe ifs
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
best
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
animals auschwitz begins looks wherever
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: theyre only animals.
thinking veils approach
A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.
truth whole
The whole is the false.
art doe facts
In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.
circles numbers keys
As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers
life cutting luxury
Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.
life jobs looks
Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
life hate peculiar
To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.