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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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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by 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.
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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.
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In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
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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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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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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.
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Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
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.
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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
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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In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
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.
Theodor Adorno
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Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
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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 gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
Theodor Adorno
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It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor Adorno
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Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Theodor Adorno
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What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Theodor Adorno
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There is no true life within a false life.
Theodor Adorno