Theodor Adorno Quotes on Politics

21 quotes

  1. 'When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.'

  2. 'Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.'

  3. 'All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.'

  4. 'An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.'

  5. 'Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.'

  6. 'Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.'

  7. 'Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.'

  8. 'In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.'

  9. 'In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.'

  10. 'Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction. '

  11. '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.'

  12. '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.'

  13. 'No emancipation without that of society.'

  14. 'None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.'

  15. 'Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.'

  16. 'Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian rule. Its organization also embraces those at war with it by co-ordinating their consciousness to its own.'

  17. 'That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.'

  18. 'The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.'

  19. 'The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror.'

  20. 'There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of rationally improved production and communications, and a modestly raised standard of living.'

  21. 'To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.'

All Theodor Adorno quotes