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Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Means
Impotence
Today
Embarrassment
Anything
Ego
Nothing
Realization
Self
Reflection
Mean
Longer
Consciousness
Knowing
Fetish

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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
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The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
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All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
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Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
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He who integrates is lost.
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.
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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.
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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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It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
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Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
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The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
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The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
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Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
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