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The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
Theodor Adorno
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Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
Theodor Adorno
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People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.
Theodor Adorno
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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.
Theodor Adorno
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Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Theodor Adorno
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
Theodor Adorno
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
Theodor Adorno
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Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
Theodor Adorno
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The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.
Theodor Adorno
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor Adorno
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The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
Theodor Adorno
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Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
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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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor Adorno