"There is no love that is not an echo."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Life has become the ideology of its own absence."
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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"
―Theodor Adorno
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"The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves."
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"Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals."
―Theodor Adorno
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"In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be."
―Theodor Adorno
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"For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live."
―Theodor Adorno
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"In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so.."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed."
―Theodor Adorno
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"It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads."
―Theodor Adorno
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"A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology."
―Theodor Adorno
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"He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality ." ―Theodor Adorno
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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."
―Theodor Adorno
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"But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
―Theodor Adorno
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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"
―Theodor Adorno
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"The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit."
―Theodor Adorno
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"As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are.."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity"
―Theodor Adorno
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"Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense."
―Theodor Adorno
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"People know what they want because they know what other people want."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar."
―Theodor Adorno
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"A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself."
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"The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness"
―Theodor Adorno
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"He who matures early lives in anticipation."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them."
―Theodor Adorno
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"True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves."
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"Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying."
―Theodor Adorno
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"On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated..."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case."
―Theodor Adorno
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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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"Horror is beyond the reach of psychology."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth."
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"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available."
―Theodor Adorno
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