Quotessence
Home / Authors / Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno Quotes

Sociologist

Filter quotes by topic

AllArtCultureIfsDoeMenPeopleWorldHumansSelfLifeThinkingTodayFormHas BeensIndustryLyingWayConceptsIdeologyOrder

Famous Theodor Adorno Quotes

“In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.”

HumansCultureInterestHuman BeingsTroubleProductsIndustryDemandHarmonyCollectivesRepresentativesBenevolentIllusory
Author:Theodor Adorno
Create image

“Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.”

HumansMadeSelfIndividualMaterialsDrawsDiscoveryEntityIndividuationSelf Contained
Book:Introduction to Sociology
Create image

“The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.”

WayHumansBodyFormCenturyWalkingNormalDignityTerrorPassingPassingsCommandFlightRhythmSpellsHeritageStemBourgeoisNineteenth CenturyHuman DignityBreathlessPacingPromenade
Author:Theodor Adorno
Create image

“What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.”

MenWorldHumansCultureCausesCommonConditionsConversionAliensClosestCommodityComponentsMachineryClosenessMirages
Author:Theodor Adorno
Create image

“The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.”

HumansFilmJoyCultureSocialEnjoySubjectsIndustryConflictFunctionDelusionWarmthTransformingInterconnectednessDehumanizationOmitting
Book:Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
Create image