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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Prescribed
Choose
Choices
Freedom
White
Black
Would
Abjure
Uncommitted

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
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The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
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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.
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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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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.
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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.
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The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
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They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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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.
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The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
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The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Theodor Adorno
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Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
Theodor Adorno
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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
Theodor Adorno
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As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers
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