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More about Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno -
Minima Moralia (1951)
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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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 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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The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.
Theodor W. Adorno
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It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor W. Adorno
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If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Theodor W. Adorno
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No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Theodor W. Adorno
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In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
Theodor W. Adorno
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
Theodor W. Adorno
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A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Theodor W. Adorno
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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
Theodor W. Adorno
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The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Theodor W. Adorno
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Theodor W. Adorno
Creative Commons
Born:
September 11, 1903
Died:
August 6, 1969
(aged 65)
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