# Quote — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

> Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.

- Author: [Theodor Adorno](https://www.leafyquotes.com/theodor-adorno.md)
- Book: [Minima Moralia](https://www.leafyquotes.com/theodor-adorno/minima-moralia.md)
- Original (de): Der vage Ausdruck erlaubt dem, der ihn vernimmt, das ungefähr sich vorzustellen, was ihm genehm ist und was er ohnehin meint. Der strenge erzwingt Eindeutigkeit der Auffassung, die Anstrengung des Begriffs, deren die Menschen bewußt entwöhnt werden, und mutet ihnen vor allem Inhalt Suspension der gängigen Urteile, damit ein sich Absondern zu, dem sie heftig widerstreben. Nur, was sie nicht erst zu verstehen brauchen, gilt ihnen für verständlich; nur das in Wahrheit Entfremdete, das vom Kommerz geprägte Wort berührt sie als vertraut.
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theodor_Adorno#Minima_Moralia_(1951)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/theodor-adorno/minima-moralia/vague-expression-permits

## More from this book

> Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of the free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, ... but only for the dead God?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/theodor-adorno/minima-moralia/who-in-the.md)

> The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/theodor-adorno/minima-moralia/the-almost-insoluble.md)

> Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/theodor-adorno/minima-moralia/tenderness-between-people.md)