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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

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
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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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Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
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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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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.
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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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Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
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Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.
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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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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
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The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.
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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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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
Theodor Adorno
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Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
Theodor Adorno
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
Theodor Adorno