Theodor Adorno Quotes on History
-
'All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at every level. The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master morality.'
-
'Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.'
-
'History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.'
-
'Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.'
-
'The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.'
-
'The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.'
-
'The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.'
-
'When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed.'