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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
Art
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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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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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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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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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Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
Theodor Adorno
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Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
Theodor Adorno
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All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
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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Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
Theodor Adorno
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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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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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All the world's not a stage.
Theodor Adorno
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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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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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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
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The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.
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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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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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Theodor Adorno