Quote #86

'The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.'

More from Theodor Adorno

  1. 'The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.'
  2. 'The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.'
  3. 'The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the v…
  4. 'The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injust…
  5. 'The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologizat…
  6. 'The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware…
  7. 'The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.'
  8. 'The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.'

All Theodor Adorno quotes