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Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by 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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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
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In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
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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And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
Theodor Adorno
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor Adorno
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Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
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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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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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
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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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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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 Adorno
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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Theodor Adorno
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Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor Adorno
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
Theodor Adorno
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In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
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 dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
Theodor Adorno