26 Theodor Adorno Quotes on Society

Theodor Adorno quotes on society

1. 'In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.'

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

12. 'And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.'

31. 'Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.'

37. '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.'

46. 'In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.'

48. 'In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them.'

53. '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.'

56. 'Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals. '

59. '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.'

62. 'No emancipation without that of society.'

66. 'Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.'

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

69. 'People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.'

70. 'Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.'

71. 'Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.'

72. 'Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.'

74. '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.'

77. '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.'

80. 'Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.'

81. '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.'

113. 'The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.'

116. 'The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honour to think of it entirely as a system; for its unifying principle is division, and it reconciles by asserting unimpaired the irreconcilability of the general and the particular.'

119. 'They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their hind-legs.'

124. 'Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be 'after' something is almost suspect.'

129. 'We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless.'