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The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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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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All the world's not a stage.
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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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The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
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Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
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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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The whole is the false.
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The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
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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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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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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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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 usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.
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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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In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
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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.
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In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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