"Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing."
―Theodor Adorno
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"In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes."
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"The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them."
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"Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you."
―Theodor Adorno
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"That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality."
―Theodor Adorno
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"When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market."
―Theodor Adorno
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"In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose."
―Theodor Adorno
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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."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."
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"Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think."
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"Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil."
―Theodor Adorno
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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."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings."
―Theodor Adorno
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"He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself."
―Theodor Adorno
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"There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth."
―Theodor Adorno
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"In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum"
―Theodor Adorno
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"The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment."
―Theodor Adorno
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"In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew."
―Theodor Adorno
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"He who integrates is lost."
―Theodor Adorno
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"No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit"
―Theodor Adorno
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"He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."
―Theodor Adorno
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"The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict"
―Theodor Adorno
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"Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people."
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"Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations."
―Theodor Adorno
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"Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline."
―Theodor Adorno
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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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"The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations."
―Theodor Adorno
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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."
―Theodor Adorno
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"What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the"
―Theodor Adorno
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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."
―Theodor Adorno
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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."
―Theodor Adorno
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