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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.

Theodor Adorno

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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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There is no love that is not an echo.
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Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
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Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
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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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In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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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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The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.
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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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The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
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All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.
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Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
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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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The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
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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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Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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The whole is the false.
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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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