Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows.

And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.

The thing is, I really can't relate to anyone my own age. Not in a superior way - an inferior way, if anything. Socially, I have no idea what my friends are talking about. I don't listen to any new music. I feel very secluded.

In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

People recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

When we belong to a community and learn things that are no way related to our society, we live as unwanted entities in that society.

The alienated man lashing out at society is a trope that popular culture loves to explore.

The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.

I don't care if your world is ending today because I wasn't invited to it anyway.

I don't approve the informality in the world today, Mr. James. It's made strangers of us all.

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

You can know the whole world and still feel lost in it.

I felt like an alien. I always felt like I never belonged to any group that I wanted to belong to.

I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world.

I remember crying all the time. My major thing growing up was I couldn't fit in. Because I was from everywhere, I didn't have no buddies that I grew up with...Every time I had to go to a new apartment, I had to reinvent myself, myself. People think just because you born in the ghetto you gonna fit in. A little twist in your life and you don't fit in no matter what. If they push you out of the hood and the White people's world, that's criminal...Hell, I felt like my could be destroyed at any moment.

In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a "force" when it no longer has individuality?

It's strange, because it seems that society is kind of promoting or nurturing this kind of ostracized existence. People are kind of very much in their own little worlds.

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world

There is nothing worse than the feeling that no one cares whether we exists or not, that no one is interested in what we have to say about life, and that the world can continue turning without our awkward presence

If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.