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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Auschwitz
Barbaric
Poetry
Writing

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
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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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For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
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The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
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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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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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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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He who integrates is lost.
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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Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor Adorno
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In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
Theodor Adorno
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The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
Theodor Adorno
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Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Theodor Adorno
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
Theodor Adorno
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Theodor Adorno
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
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Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
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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On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
Theodor Adorno