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Theodor W. Adorno Quotes
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Philosophy … must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
Theodor W. Adorno
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In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The jargon makes it seem that … the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.
Theodor W. Adorno
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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The concept of positivity in itself, in abstracto, has become part and parcel of the ideology today.... Critique has started to become suspect, regardless of its content.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
Theodor W. Adorno
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What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Theodor W. Adorno
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When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Theodor W. Adorno
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Born:
September 11, 1903
Died:
August 6, 1969
(aged 65)
Bio:
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society.
Known for:
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
Minima Moralia (1951)
Aesthetic Theory
Negative Dialectics (1966)
The Jargon of Authenticity (1964)
Most used words:
philosophy
time
freedom
people
culture
human
society
concept
self
thought
language
true
individual
precisely
art
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