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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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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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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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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
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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Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.
Theodor Adorno
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
Theodor Adorno
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For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
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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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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Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
Theodor Adorno
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
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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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
Theodor Adorno
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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
Theodor Adorno
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As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers
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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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
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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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno