Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Cultural change always precedes political change.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

All societies are historical.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

The correct rate of speed in innovating changes in long-standing social customs has not yet been determined by even the most expert of the experts. Personally I am beginning to think there is more danger in lagging than in speeding up cultural change to keep pace with mechanical change.

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

The conception that, instead of this, contemporary society is at or near a turning point is very prominent in the views of a school of social scientists who, though they are still comparatively few, are getting more and more of a hearing.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

Do you believe that life today is the same as it was 10 centuries ago? This tremendous change was produced by the West. Who else produced it?

Cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

Audiences change because life changes. Countries change geographically, climatically, socially and morally. Many things happen, and cinema, in a sense, reflects what's happening in the world.