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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
State
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Powerlessness
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Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
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All the world's not a stage.
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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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Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
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Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
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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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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
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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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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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The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
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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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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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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 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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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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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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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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Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
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