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Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
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Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
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In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
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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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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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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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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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Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
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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 gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
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In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
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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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