“In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—“Geist”—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.”

as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187

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Theodor W. Adorno 90
German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for … 1903–1969

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