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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Intellectuals
Represent
Advice

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
Theodor Adorno
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Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
Theodor Adorno
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Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
Theodor Adorno
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor 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 Adorno
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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Theodor Adorno
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Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
Theodor Adorno
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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
Theodor 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 Adorno
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There is no true life within a false life.
Theodor Adorno
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Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
Theodor Adorno
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
Theodor Adorno
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It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
Theodor Adorno
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
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Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
Theodor Adorno
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The whole is the false.
Theodor Adorno
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Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
Theodor Adorno
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A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
Theodor Adorno
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
Theodor Adorno