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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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The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
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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 capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.
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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
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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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True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
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Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
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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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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
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In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
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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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Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
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The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
Theodor Adorno
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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.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
Theodor Adorno