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Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
Theodor W. Adorno
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is no right life in the wrong one.”
“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.”
“Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.”
“Life has become the ideology of its own absence.”
“There is no true life within a false life.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted charm.”
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Book Keywords:
distrust, absence, sophistication, life, ideology, evil, vanity, film, communication, lying-to-ourselves, emptiness