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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

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
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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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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
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Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Theodor Adorno
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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Theodor Adorno
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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Theodor Adorno
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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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Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
Theodor Adorno
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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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And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
Theodor Adorno
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor Adorno
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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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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.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
Theodor Adorno