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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
Perceive
Complete
State
Individual
Left
Reprieve
States
Perceives
Live
Powerlessness
Time
Brief

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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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 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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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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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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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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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
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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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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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There is no true life within a false life.
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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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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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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
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All the world's not a stage.
Theodor Adorno
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The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
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The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
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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.
Theodor Adorno