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Category: Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

humility, hypocrisy, self-awareness

Theodor W. Adorno

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

Theodor W. Adorno

Triviality is evil – triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

evil, inertia, morality, triviality

Theodor W. Adorno

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning

grasping, ideas, meaning, thoughts

Theodor W. Adorno

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.

Theodor W. Adorno

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

animal-cruelty, animal-rights, animals, theodor-w-adorno

Theodor W. Adorno

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

auschwitz, ethics, progress, torture

Theodor W. Adorno

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.

dialectic, dialectical-materialism, enlightenment, frankfurt-school, modernism, modernity, myth, nazi-culture, nazism, post-ww-ii, self-destructive

Theodor W. Adorno

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.

art, authenticity, postmodernism

Theodor W. Adorno

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

culture-critique, humour

Theodor W. Adorno

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

music, music-criticism, new-music