Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Isn't it in the nature of intellectuals to be culture critics?

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

It is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.

Critics have a responsibility to put things in a cultural and sociological or political context. That is important.

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.

I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.

I think the job of art and drama is to hold a mirror up to those things and say, 'What do you think about it?'

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

The critic roams through culture, looking for prey.

I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.

Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.

But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.

Culture shouldn't be a pacifying thing. It shouldn't be something that you just passively accept. I think it should be something that, in some ways, is quite disruptive - makes you think and question things, and actually sparks debate.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

Criticism is not construction, it is observation.

A critic is a necessary evil, and criticism is an evil necessity.

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals.

No one attacks loose-thinking and folly with half the precision and zest of Thomas Szasz.

The method of the critic is to balance praises with censure, and thus to do justice to the subject and--his own discrimination.