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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Intellectuals
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Advice

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
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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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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.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
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In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
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All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
Theodor Adorno
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Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Theodor Adorno
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Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
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.
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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 Adorno
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
Theodor Adorno
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Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Theodor Adorno
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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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The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
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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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 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 Adorno
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The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.
Theodor Adorno