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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.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
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The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
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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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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
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Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
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Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
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The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
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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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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
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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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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
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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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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
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