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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.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
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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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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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He who integrates is lost.
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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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Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
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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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It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.
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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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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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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
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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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Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
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Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
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Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
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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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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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