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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.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Silently
Utopia
Oppose
Contained
Decline
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West
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Resurrected

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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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Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
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Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
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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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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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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
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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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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
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There is no true life within a false life.
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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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On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
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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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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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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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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 need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
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