Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived.

Temperament lies behind mood; behind will, lies the fate of character. Then behind both, the influence of family the tyranny of culture; and finally the power of climate and environment; and we are free, only to the extent we rise above these.

Man is the creature of circumstances.

You are bound to pick up influences.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

I'm very much a person of nurture over nature. When the world is not nurturing, it can really change a man.

A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?

We are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe.

The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence without that affects him after his birth.

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct — and societal repression much more devastating.

People are not born heroes or villains; they’re created by the people around them.

Your environment influences your mindset.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.

Practically the whole human race is hypnotized because it thinks what somebody else told it to think.

Situation seems to be the mould in which men's characters are formed.

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices.

Use almost can change the stamp of nature.

In London, Man is the most secret animal on earth.

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work...that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself....The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors." "They call themselves ignorant and say the 'professor' is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen." "Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world.

The modern world seems to make fun of people in a lot of ways.

Evil is not intrinsic. It's fashioned.