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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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Theodor Adorno
Inadequacy
Monotonous
Oriented
Purely
Revealed
Boring
Purpose
Practicality
Form
Impoverished

More quotes by 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.
Theodor Adorno
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In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
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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
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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 power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
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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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.
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.
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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
Theodor Adorno
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True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
Theodor Adorno
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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
Theodor Adorno
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Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Theodor Adorno
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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Theodor Adorno
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
Theodor Adorno
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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
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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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
Theodor Adorno
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Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
Theodor Adorno