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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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Theodor Adorno
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The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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The whole is the false.
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Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
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Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
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It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
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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 basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.
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The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
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History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
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It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
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The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
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