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Theodor W. Adorno Quotes
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For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Theodor W. Adorno
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All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
Theodor W. Adorno
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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 thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity
Theodor W. Adorno
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Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.
Theodor W. Adorno
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What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.
Theodor W. Adorno
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That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.
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So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Theodor W. Adorno
Creative Commons
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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