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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
Art
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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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Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
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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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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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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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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
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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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The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
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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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The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
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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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For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
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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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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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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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Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
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Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
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All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
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