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On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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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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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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The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.
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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.
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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.
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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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
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The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
Theodor Adorno
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Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
Theodor Adorno
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
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Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Theodor Adorno
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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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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No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
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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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Theodor Adorno
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Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
Theodor Adorno
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The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
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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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
Theodor Adorno