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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.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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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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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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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
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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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The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.
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Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
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In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
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They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
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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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The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
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He who integrates is lost.
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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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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
Theodor Adorno