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In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Time
Brief
Perceive
Complete
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Left
Reprieve
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Powerlessness

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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
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Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
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In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
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And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
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The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
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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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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
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The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
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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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A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
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Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
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The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.
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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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It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
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Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
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In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
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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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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
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