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"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category."
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"With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken-formerly it was only the prominent-and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait."
"Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls."
"And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day."
"For millions of years, man spoke only to what he could see. Suddenly, in just one decade, 'seeing' and 'speaking' have been separated. We think we're used to it, yet we don't realize the immense impact it's had on our reflexes. Our bodies are simply not used to it. Frankly, the result is that, when we talk on the telephone, we enter a state that is similar to certain magical trances; we can discover other things about ourselves."
"These days we have Smartphones, Smartcars, Smartboards, Smarteverything, but consider this: if technology is getting smarter, does that mean humans are getting dumber?"
"Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work."
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
Explore more quotes by Theodor Adorno
"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."
"Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane."
"The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power."
"The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us."
"Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology."
"Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem."
"If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward."
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