Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.

No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

I simply can't imagine the world will ever be normal again for us. I do talk about "after the war," but it's as if I'm talking about a castle in the air, something that can never come true.

If things do get better in Iraq, I'm saying as someone who thinks the war was a mistake. I'm saying that is cause for us all to have a huge party. It's a big deal if things get better. Because if they don't get better, our country is going to be hurt for generations.

Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man.

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

I have never once been persuaded as to the causal link between the Iraqi regime, al-Qaeda and September 11. I do believe the impact of war under these circumstances is bound to weaken the international coalition against terrorism itself.

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

We think-although of course, now, we very seldom Clearly think- That the other side of War is Peace.

Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is - and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.

We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.

When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

War that hasn't affected us here, in the way that you would imagine a five-year war would affect a country.

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subject to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees, the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors.

Every war, when viewed from the undistorted perspective of life’s sanctity, is a “civil war” waged by humanity against itself.

The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.

Before this war is over,' [Walter] said - or something said through his lips - 'every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it - you, Mary, will feel it - feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come - and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over - years, Mary. And in those years millions of hearts will break.

In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.