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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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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
Theodor Adorno
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Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor 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 Adorno
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A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.
Theodor Adorno
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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
Theodor 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 Adorno
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Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
Theodor Adorno
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Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
Theodor 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 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 Adorno
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
Theodor Adorno
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
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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The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
Theodor Adorno
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The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
Theodor Adorno
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No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
Theodor Adorno
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The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
Theodor 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 Adorno
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For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Theodor Adorno
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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