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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.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
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Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
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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 recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
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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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The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
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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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Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
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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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Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
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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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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
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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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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
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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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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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