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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.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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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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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
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In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
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In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
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The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
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Love is the ability to discover similarities in the dis-similar. The audience has a right not to be fooled - even if it insists on being fooled.
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There is no love that is not an echo.
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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.
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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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The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
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The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
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Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
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None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
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Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
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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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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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What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.
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Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
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