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The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

Theodor Adorno

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Theodor Adorno
Purpose
Practicality
Form
Impoverished
Inadequacy
Monotonous
Oriented
Purely
Revealed
Boring

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Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.
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Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
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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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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
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As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers
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The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
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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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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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Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
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In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.
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Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
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There is no love that is not an echo.
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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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All the world's not a stage.
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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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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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In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
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