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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
State
Individual
Left
Reprieve
States
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Powerlessness

More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
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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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For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
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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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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
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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 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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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
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In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
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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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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
Theodor Adorno
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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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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
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If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
Theodor Adorno
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The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
Theodor Adorno
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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
Theodor Adorno