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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Torment
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History
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More quotes by 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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The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
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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.
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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.
Theodor Adorno
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
Theodor Adorno
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A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.
Theodor Adorno
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Theodor Adorno
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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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No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
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Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
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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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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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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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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
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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 gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
Theodor Adorno
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The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
Theodor Adorno
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True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno