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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
Even
Normally
Life
Continue
Already
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War
Rebuilt
Culture
Negation
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Idiotic

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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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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 noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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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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There is no love that is not an echo.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
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Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
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There is no true life within a false life.
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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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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
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One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.
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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 straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
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Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
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The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.
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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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