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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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Theodor Adorno
Today
Artistic
Chaos
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Bring
Voluntarily
Artist
Involuntary
Art
Productivity
Order
Task

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.
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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
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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.
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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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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.
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Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
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Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
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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.
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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.
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The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
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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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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
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Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
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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.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
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