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

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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.
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The whole is the false.
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Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
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The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
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The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
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It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
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What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
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Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
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All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
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Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
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People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.
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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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The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
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Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
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