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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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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.
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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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.
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
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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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Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
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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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It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
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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.
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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.
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In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
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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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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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The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
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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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
Theodor Adorno