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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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In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.
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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 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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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 task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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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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Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
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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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In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
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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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On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
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Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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