Adorno Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Adorno. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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There is no right life in the wrong one.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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People know what they want because they know what other people want.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home
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Theodor W. Adorno
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freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,' as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don't drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don't drink if you have the blues: it's a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It's not true that you shouldn't drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can't properly remember last night. (If you really don't remember, that's an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designedβ€”as are the grape and the grainβ€”to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won't be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
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Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)
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Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Metaphysics: Concept and Problems)
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Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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There is no love that is not an echo.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
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Theodor W. 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.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)
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Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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There is no true life within a false life.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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A landscape becomes uglier when an admirer disrupts it with the words 'how beautiful'.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Introduction to Sociology)
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The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
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Theodor W. 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.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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Notaba las cicatrices de ella bajo los dedos, y quiso decirle que para Γ©l eran como adornos, testimonios de su valentΓ­a que sΓ³lo la hacΓ­an mΓ‘s hermosa.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments, #5))
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Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen
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Theodor W. Adorno
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If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity
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Theodor W. Adorno
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On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Cultural Memory in the Present))
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Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Negative Dialectics)
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The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.
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Theodor W. Adorno (The Culture Industry)
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La elegancia no consiste en el exceso de adornos, ni en la profusiΓ³n de alhajas.
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RubΓ©n DarΓ­o (Azul...)
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The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply. Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment)
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Happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
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Theodor W. Adorno (The Culture Industry)
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The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.
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Theodor W. Adorno (The Culture Industry)
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We humans have grown cleverer but not wiser .
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted charm.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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...there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Major thinkers in this century from a wide range of traditions in philosophy are scarcely comprehensible without understanding their relation to Hegel. This is true of Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, KojΓ¨ve (whose thought has been reworked by Francis Fukuyama in his writing on the β€˜end of history’), Derrida, Lacan, Rorty, Royce, Althusser, Charles Taylor, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and many others.
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Raymond Plant (The Great Philosophers: Hegel)
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Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labor markets and to heighten to commodity value of the personality.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Cultural Memory in the Present))
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Jazz is the false liquidation of art β€” instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Ich fΓΌrchte nicht die RΓΌckkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Faschisten, sondern die RΓΌckkehr der Faschisten in der Maske der Demokraten.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Los libros no se han hecho para servir de adorno: sin embargo, nada hay que embellezca tanto como ellos en el interior del hogar.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
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The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
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Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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I have no hobby. As far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbiesβ€”preoccupations in which I had become mindlessly infatuated in order to kill the timeβ€”had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality.
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Theodor W. Adorno (The Culture Industry)
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Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Nowadays most people kick with the pricks.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Despair has the accent of irrevocability not because things cannot improve, but because it draws the past too into its vortex.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments)
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Der Verfall des Schenkens spiegelt sich in der peinlichen Erfindung der Geschenkartikel, die bereits darauf angelegt sind, daß man nicht weiß, was man schenken soll, weil man es eigentlich gar nicht will. Diese Waren sind beziehungslos wie ihre KÀufer.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life)
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I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I. Woke up feeling extremely satisfied.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a new and significant light. Espen took that path, and I followed him like a brainless puppy, it was true, but I did follow him. I leafed through Adorno, read some passages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida and Foucault, had a go at Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze, while poems by EkelΓΆf, BjΓΆrling, Pound, MallarmΓ©, Rilke, Trakl, Ashbery, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen, and Hauge floated around, on which I spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings.
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Karl Ove KnausgΓ₯rd (Min kamp 1 (Min kamp, #1))
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One should never begrudge deletions.
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Theodor W. Adorno
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Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
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Theodor W. 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 clichΓ©, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Essays on Music)
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The subjectivist approach to art simply fails to understand that the subjective experience of art in itself is meaningless, and that in order to grasp the importance of art one has to zero in on the artistic object rather than on the fun of the art lover.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)
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Canta, hija, canta y trina, si ese es tu camino. Buscate por dentro, hurgate hasta que descubras, sin miedos, quien habita en tu interior. Hablame de tus dudas, de tus fantasias, de tu curiosidad justificada por la reproduccion humana y animal, de tu preocupacion por la politica, de tu interes por las artes: la vida es un abanico de posibilidades de realizacion personal. Encuentra las tuyas, para eso tienes a tu madre, un faro en tu camino, una referencia nocturna de la cual careci yo en mis noches de miedo. No seras un objeto de adorno. Pensaras, construiras, haras, propondras, no callaras, aportaras, disfrutaras la cama y a tu pareja, te reiras con un par de tequilas y sin ellos, seras plena, intensa, exitosa, risueΓ±a y enormemente productiva para que el dia que te mueras, espero que sea muy tarde y sobre todo mucho despues de que yo haya partido para siempre, lo puedas hacer con una sonrisa en el rostro.
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Francisco MartΓ­n Moreno (MΓ©xico ante Dios)
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Era vestito completamente di nero e con una eleganza che non era abituale fra i filibustieri del grande Golfo del Messico, uomini che si accontentavano di un paio di calzoni e d'una camicia, e che curavano piΓΉ le loro armi che gli indumenti. [...] Anche l'aspetto di quell'uomo aveva, come il vestito, qualcosa di funebre, con quel volto pallido, quasi marmoreo, che spiccava stranamente fra le nere trine del colletto e le larghe tese del cappello, adorno d'una barba corta, nera, tagliata alla nazzarena un po' arricciata. Aveva perΓ² i lineamenti bellissimi: un naso regolare, due labbra piccole e rosse come il corallo, una fronte ampia solcata da una leggera ruga che dava a quel volto un non so che di malinconico, due occhi poi neri come carbonchi, d'un taglio perfetto, dalle ciglia lunghe, vivide e animate da un lampo tale che in certi momenti doveva sgomentare anche i piΓΉ intrepidi filibustieri di tutto il golfo. La sua statura alta, slanciata, il suo portamento elegante, le sue mani aristocratiche, lo facevano conoscere, anche a prima vista, per un uomo d'alta condizione sociale e soprattutto per un uomo abituato al comando.
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Emilio Salgari (Il Corsaro Nero)
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The late Franz Borkenau once said, after he had broken with the Communist Party, that he could no longer put up with the practice of discussing municipal regulations in the categories of Hegelian logic, and Hegelian logic in the spirit of meetings of the town council.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Aesthetics and Politics)
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Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself.
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Theodor W. Adorno (Negative Dialectics)
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The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life goes unheard
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Max Horkheimer
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That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention. I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness. Some, like Gorky or Gold, were overtly subversive in their political aims; others, like Fitzgerald and Mark Twain, were in my opinion more subversive, if less obviously so. I told them we would come back to this term, because my understanding of it was somewhat different from its usual definition. I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: β€œThe highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
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Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
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What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music. It is then a supreme irony that traces of this same fetishizing procedure can be found in Adorno's own writings. Many of his provocative one-liners do effectively capture a profound insight or at least touch on a crucial point (for example: "Nothing is more true in pscyhoanalysis than its exaggeration"); however, more often than his partisans are ready to admit, Adorno gets caught up in his own game, infatuated with his own ability to produce dazzlingly "effective" paradoxical aphorisms at the expense of theoretical substance (recall the famous line from Dialectic of Englightment on how Hollywood's ideological maniuplation of social reality realized Kant's idea of the transcendental constitution of reality). In such cases where the dazzling "effect" of the unexpected short-circuit (here between Hollywood cinema and Kantian ontology) effectively overshadows the theoretical line of argumentation, the brilliant paradox works precisely in the same manner as the Wagnerian leitmotif: instead of serving as a nodal point in the complex network of structural mediation, it generates idiotic pleasure by focusing attention on itself. This unintended self-reflexivity is something of which Adorno undoubtedly was not aware: his critique of the Wagnerian leitmotif was an allegorical critique of his own writing. Is this not an exemplary case of his unconscious reflexivity of thinking? When criticizing his opponent Wagner, Adorno effectively deploys a critical allegory of his own writing - in Hegelese, the truth of his relation to the Other is a self-relation.
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Slavoj Ε½iΕΎek (Living in the End Times)