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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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More quotes by Theodor Adorno

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Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
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Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
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Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
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The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject
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Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
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Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
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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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The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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Dissonance is the truth about harmony.
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Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
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The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.
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If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
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Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
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Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
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Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
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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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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 man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
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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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True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
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