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Thus Is Order Ensured: Some Have To Play The Game Because They Cannot Otherwise Live, And Those Who Could Live Otherwise Are Kept Out Because They Do Not Want To Play The Game. It Is As If The Class From Which Independent Intellectuals Have Defected Takes Its Revenge, By Pressing Its Demands Home In The Very Domain Where The Deserter Seeks Refuge.

-Theodor Adorno

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Thus Is Order Ensured:

Theodor Adorno

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Thus Is Order Ensured: Some Have To Play The Game Because They Cannot Otherwise Live, And Those Who Could Live Otherwise Are Kept Out Because They Do Not Want To Play The Game. It Is As If The Class From Which Independent Intellectuals Have Defected Takes Its Revenge, By Pressing Its Demands Home In The Very Domain Where The Deserter Seeks Refuge.

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In The Abstract Conception Of Universal Wrong, All Concrete Responsibility Vanishes.

Once The Last Trace Of Emotion Has Been Eradicated, Nothing Remains Of Thought But Absolute Tautology.

In The End Indignation Over Kitsch Is Anger At Tis Shameless Revelling In The Joy Of Imitation.

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.

Tact Is The Discrimination Of Differences. It Consists In Conscious Deviations.

Horror Is Beyond The Reach Of Psychology.

For A Man Who No Longer Has A Homeland, Writing Becomes A Place To Live.

The Metaphysical Apologia At Least Betrayed The Injustice Of The Established Order Through The Incongruence Of Concept And Reality. The Impartiality Of Scientific Language Deprived What Was Powerless Of The Strength To Make Itself Heard And Merely Provided The Existing Order With A Neutral Sign For Itself. Such Neutrality Is More Metaphysical Than Metaphysics.

In The Products Of The Culture Industry Human Beings Get Into Trouble Only So That They Can Be Rescued Unharmed, Usually By Representatives Of A Benevolent Collective; And Then, In Illusory Harmony, They Are Reconciled With The General Interest Whose Demands They Had Initially Experienced As Irreconcilable With Their Own.

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Vague Expression Permits The Hearer To Imagine Whatever Suits Him And What He Already Thinks In Any Case.

When All Actions Are Mathematically Calculated, They Also Take On A Stupid Quality.

Every Work Of Art Is An Uncommitted Crime.

Not Only Is The Self Entwined In Society; It Owes Society Its Existence In The Most Literal Sense.

The Thought That Murders The Wish That Fathered It Will Be Overtaken By The Revenge Of Stupidity

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In The General Tendency Toward Specialization, Philosophy Too Has Established Itself As A Specialized Discipline, One Purified Of All Specific Content. In So Doing, Philosophy Has Denied Its Own Constitutive Concept: The Intellectual Freedom That Does Not Obey The Dictates Of Specialized Knowledge.

The Straight Line Is Regarded As The Shortest Distance Between Two People, As If They Were Points.

Tenderness Between People Is Nothing Other Than Awareness Of The Possibility Of Relations Without Purpose.

Triviality Is Evil - Triviality, That Is, In The Form Of Consciousness And Mind That Adapts Itself To The World As It Is, That Obeys The Principle Of Inertia. And This Principle Of Inertia Truly Is What Is Radically Evil.

Love Is The Ability To Discover Similarities In The Dis-similar. The Audience Has A Right Not To Be Fooled - Even If It Insists On Being Fooled.

Love You Will Find Only Where You May Show Yourself Weak Without Provoking Strength.

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.

The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order.

Advice To Intellectuals: Let No-one Represent You.

Because Thought Has By Now Been Perverted Into The Solving Of Assigned Problems, Even What Is Not Assigned Is Processed Like A Problem.

Words Of The Jargon Sound As If They Said Something Higher Than What They Mean.

Writing Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric.

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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.

The Individual Mirrors In His Individuation The Preordained Social Laws Of Exploitation, However Mediated.

In Psycho-analysis Nothing Is True Except The Exaggerations.

The Objective Tendency Of The Enlightenment, To Wipe Out The Power Of Images Over Man, Is Not Matched By Any Subjective Progress On The Part Of Enlightened Thinking Towards Freedom From Images.

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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, Enjoy Their Own Dehumanization As Something Human, As The Joy Of Warmth. The Total Interconnectedness Of The Culture Industry, Omitting Nothing, Is One With Total Social Delusion.

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The Inadequacy Of The Purely Purpose-oriented Form Is Revealed For What It Is-a Monotonous, Impoverished Boring Practicality.

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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Division Of Labor

A Thinking That Approaches It Objects Openly, Rigorously ... Is Also Free Toward Its Objects In The Sense That It Refuses To Have Rules Prescribed To It By Organized Knowledge. It ... Rends The Veil With Which Society Conceals Them, And Perceives Them Anew.

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Philosophy ... Must Not Bargain Away Anything Of The Emphatic Concept Of Truth.

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The Forms Of Art Reflect The History Of Man More Truthfully Than Do Documents Themselves.

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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.

There Is No True Life Within A False Life.

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The Darkening Of The World Makes The Irrationality Of Art Rational: Radically Darkened Art.

Love Is The Power To See Similarity In The Dissimilar.

Art Respects The Masses, By Standing Up To Them For What They Could Be, Rather Than Conforming To Them In Their Degraded State.

Knowledge, Which Is Power, Knows No Limits, Either In Its Enslavement Of Creation Or In Its Deference To Worldly Masters.

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Black And White

Everything About Art Has Become Problematic; Its Inner Life, Its Relation To Society, Even Its Right To Exist.

Freud Made The Discovery- Quite Genuinely, Simply Through Working On His Own Material- That The More Deeply One Explores The Phenomena Of Human Individuation, The More Unreservedly One Grasps The Individual As A Self-contained And Dynamic Entity, The Closer One Draws To That In The Individual Which Is Really No Longer Individual.

The Man For Whom Time Stretches Out Painfully Is One Waiting In Vain, Disappointed At Not Finding Tomorrow Already Continuing Yesterday.

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. Immovably, They Insist On The Very Ideology Which Enslaves Them. The Misplaced Love Of The Common People For The Wrong Which Is Done To Them Is A Greater Force Than The Cunning Of The Authorities.

In Anglo-saxon Countries The Prostitutes Look As If They Purveyed, Along With Sin, The Attendant Pains Of Hell.

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.

Lies Are Told Only To Convey To Someone That One Has No Need Either Of Him Or His Good Opinion.

The Bourgeois ... Is Tolerant. His Love For People As They Are Stems From His Hatred Of What They Might Be.

What Is Or Is Not The Jargon Is Determined By Whether The Word Is Written In An Intonation Which Places It Transcendently In Opposition To Its Own Meaning; By Whether The Individual Words Are Loaded At The Expense Of The Sentence, Its Propositional Force, And The Thought Content.

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.

The Poor Are Prevented From Thinking By The Discipline Of Others, The Rich By Their Own.

The Empirical Usability Of The Sacred Ceremonial Words Makes Both The Speaker And Listener Believe In Their Corporeal Presence.

In So Far As The Culture Industry Arouses A Feeling Of Well-being That The World Is Precisely In That Order Suggested By The Culture Industry, The Substitute Gratification Which It Prepares For Human Beings Cheats Them Out Of The Same Happiness Which It Deceitfully Projects.

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. While He Gropingly Forms His Own Life In The Frail Image Of A True Existence, He Should Never Forget Its Frailty, Nor How Little The Image Is A Substitute For True Life. Against Such Awareness, However, Pulls The Momentum Of The Bourgeois Within Him.

The First And Only Principle Of Sexual Ethics: The Accuser Is Always In The Wrong.

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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.

Everything That Has Ever Been Called Folk Art Has Always Reflected Domination.

The Enlightenment Has Always Aimed At Liberating Men From Fear And Establishing Their Sovereignty. Yet The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant.

Today Self-consciousness No Longer Means Anything But Reflection On The Ego As Embarrassment, As Realization Of Impotence: Knowing That One Is Nothing.

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.

He Who Integrates Is Lost.

The Only Philosophy That Can Be Practiced Responsibly In The Face Of Despair Is The Attempt To Contemplate All Things As They Would Present Themselves From The Standpoint Of Redemption. Knowledge Has No Light But That Shed On The World By Redemption: All Else Is Reconstruction, Mere Technique. Perspectives Must Be Fashioned That Displace And Estrange The World, That Reveal Its Fissures And Crevices, As Indigent And Distorted As It Will One Day Appear In The Messianic Light.

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.

He Who Matures Early Lives In Anticipation.

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.

The Recent Past Always Presents Itself As If Destroyed By Catastrophes.

The Lie Has Long Since Lost Its Honest Function Of Misrepresenting Reality. Nobody Believes Anybody, Everyone Is In The Know. Lies Are Told Only To Convey To Someone That One Has No Need Either Of Him Or His Good Opinion.

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.

None Of The Abstract Concepts Comes Closer To Fulfilled Utopia Than That Of Eternal Peace.

Very Evil People Cannot Really Be Imagined Dying.

The Noiseless Din That We Have Long Known In Dreams, Booms At Us In Waking Hours From Newspaper Headlines.

They [the Critics] Deal With Schoenberg's Early Works And All Their Wealth By Classifying Them, With The Music-historical Cliché, As Late Romantic Post-wagnerian. One Might Just As Well Dispose Of Beethoven As A Late-classicist Post-haydnerian.

The Phrase, The World Wants To Be Deceived, Has Become Truer Than Had Ever Been Intended. People Are Not Only, As The Saying Goes, Falling For The Swindle; If It Guarantees Them Even The Most Fleeting Gratification They Desire A Deception Which Is Nonetheless Transparent To Them. They Force Their Eyes Shut And Voice Approval, In A Kind Of Self-loathing, For What Is Meted Out To Them, Knowing Fully The Purpose For Which It Is Manufactured. Without Admitting It They Sense That Their Lives Would Be Completely Intolerable As Soon As They No Longer Clung To Satisfactions Which Are None At All.

Only A Humanity To Whom Death Has Become As Indifferent As Its Members, That Has Itself Died, Can Inflict It Administratively On Innumerable People.

Laughing In The Cultural Industry Is Mockery Of Happiness.

The Power Of The Culture Industry's Ideology Is Such That Conformity Has Replaced Consciousness

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.

But He Who Dies In Despair Has Lived His Whole Life In Vain.

Life Has Changed Into A Timeless Succession Of Shocks, Interspaced With Empty, Paralysed Intervals.

All The World's Not A Stage.

If Philosophy Is Still Necessary, It Is So Only In The Way It Has Been From Time Immemorial: As Critique, As Resistance To The Expanding Heteronomy, Even If Only As Thought's Powerless Attempt To Remain Its Own Master And To Convict Of Untruth, By Their Own Criteria, Both A Fabricated Mythology And A Conniving, Resigned Acquiescence.

Auschwitz Begins Wherever Someone Looks At A Slaughterhouse And Thinks: They’re Only Animals.

Fascism Is Itself Less 'ideological', In So Far As It Openly Proclaims The Principle Of Domination That Is Elsewhere Concealed.

Rampant Technolgy Eliminates Luxury, But Not By Declaring Privilege A Human Right; Rather, It Does So By Both Raising The General Standard Of Living And Cutting Off The Possibility Of Fulfilment.

The Important Thing Is Not The Planning Of An Index Verborum Prohibitorum Of Current Noble Nouns, But Rather The Examination Of Their Linguistic Function.

What The Philosophers Once Knew As Life Has Become The Sphere Of Private Existence And Now Of Mere Consumption, Dragged Along As An Appendage Of The Process Of Material Production, Without Autonomy Or Substance Of Its Own.

And How Comfortless Is The Thought That The Sickness Of The Normal Does Not Necessarily Imply As Its Opposite The Health Of The Sick, But That The Latter Usually Only Present, In A Different Way, The Same Disastrous Pattern.

The Very People Who Burst With Proofs Of Exuberant Vitality Could Easily Be Taken For Prepared Corpses, From Whom The News Of Their Not-quite-successful Decease Has Been Withheld For Reasons Of Population Policy. Underlying The Prevalent Health Is Death. All The Movements Of Health Resemble The Reflex-movements Of Beings Whose Hearts Have Stopped Beating.

The Dialectic Cannot Stop Short Before The Conceptsof Health And Sickness, Nor Indeed Before Their Siblings Reason And Unreason.

Happiness Is Obsolete: Uneconomic.

In The Age Of The Individual's Liquidation, The Question Of Individuality Must Be Raised Anew.

Philosophy That Satisfies Its Own Intention, And Does Not Childishly Skip Behind Its Own History And The Real One, Has Its Lifeblood In The Resistance Against The Common Practices Of Today And What They Serve, Against The Justification Of What Happens To Be The Case.

The Whole Is The False.

The Human Is Indissolubly Linked With Imitation: A Human Being Only Becomes Human At All By Imitating Other Human Beings.

Imitating Others

It Is Barbaric To Write Poetry After Auschwitz.

Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly.

Advancing Bourgeois Society Liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection As Irrational Leftovers Of The Past.

The Joke Of Our Time Is The Suicide Of Intention.

Art Is The Social Antithesis Of Society, Not Directly Deducible From It.

One Must Have Tradition In Oneself, To Hate It Properly.

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.

The Gods Look In Pleasure On Penitent Sinners.

It Would Be Advisable To Think Of Progress In The Crudest, Most Basic Terms: That No One Should Go Hungry Anymore, That There Should Be No More Torture, No More Auschwitz. Only Then Will The Idea Of Progress Be Free From Lies.

The Aim Of Jazz Is The Mechanical Reproduction Of A Regressive Moment, A Castration Symbolism. 'give Up Your Masculinity, Let Yourself Be Castrated,' The Eunuchlike Sound Of The Jazz Band Both Mocks And Proclaims, 'and You Will Be Rewarded, Accepted Into A Fraternity Which Shares The Mystery Of Impotence With You, A Mystery Revealed At The Moment Of The Initiation Rite.

To Say 'we' And Mean 'i' Is One Of The Most Recondite Insults.

Humanity Had To Inflict Terrible Injuries On Itself Before The Self, The Identical, Purpose-directed, Masculine Character Of Human Beings Was Created, And Something Of This Process Is Repeated In Every Childhood.

All Satire Is Blind To The Forces Liberated By Decay. Which Is Why Total Decay Has Absorbed The Forces Of Satire.

On Their Way Toward Modern Science Human Beings Have Discarded Meaning. The Concept Is Replaced By The Formula, The Cause By Rules And Probability.

By Abstaining From All Definite Content, Whether As Formal Logic And Theory Of Science Or As The Legend Of Being Beyond All Beings, Philosophy Declared Its Bankruptcy Regarding Concrete Social Goals.

Modernity Is A Qualitative, Not A Chronological, Category.

The Basest Person Is Capable Of Perceiving The Weaknesses Of The Greatest, The Most Stupid, The Errors In The Thought Of The Most Intelligent.

There Is No Love That Is Not An Echo.

History Does Not Merely Touch On Language, But Takes Place In It.

The Work Of Art Still Has Something In Common With Enchantment: It Posits Its Own, Self-enclosed Area, Which Is Withdrawn From The Context Of Profane Existence, And In Which Special Laws Apply.

People Know What They Want Because They Know What Other People Want.

Thus Is Order Ensured: Some Have To Play The Game Because They Cannot Otherwise Live, And Those Who Could Live Otherwise Are Kept Out Because They Do Not Want To Play The Game. It Is As If The Class From Which Independent Intellectuals Have Defected Takes Its Revenge, By Pressing Its Demands Home In The Very Domain Where The Deserter Seeks Refuge.

Kitsch Evokes A Future Utopia Looking Back At A Past That Is Selectively (mis)remembered, Thereby Helping To Stabilize The Present Toward Which Kitsch Is Otherwise Deeply Anatagonistic.

The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order. Artistic Productivity Is The Capacity For Being Voluntarily Involuntary.

The Positive Element Of Kitsch Lies In The Fact That It Sets Free For A Moment The Glimmering Realization That You Have Wasted Your Life.

Of The World As It Exists, It Is Not Possible To Be Enough Afraid.

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.

Kitsch Parodies Catharsis...it Is In Vain To Try To Draw The Boundaries Abstractly Between Aesthetic Fiction And Kitsch's Emotional Plunder. It Is A Poison Admixed To All Art; Excising It Is Today One Of Art's Despairing Efforts.

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.

So The Experience Of Death Is Turned Into That Of The Exchange Of Functionaries, And Anything In The Natural Relationship To Death That Is Not Wholly Absorbed Into The Social One Is Turned Over To Hygiene. In Being Seen As No More Than The Exit Of A Living Creature From The Social Combine, Death Has Been Domesticated: Dying Merely Confirms The Absolute Irrelevance Of The Natural Organism In Face Of The Social Absolute.

Jazz Is The False Liquidation Of Art - Instead Of Utopia Becoming Reality It Disappears From The Picture.

Intolerance Of Ambiguity Is The Mark Of An Authoritarian Personality.

Truth Is Inseperable From The Illusory Belief That From The Figures Of The Unreal One Day, In Spite Of All, Real Deliverance Will Come.

Even The Loveliest Dream Bears Like A Blemish Its Difference From Reality, The Awareness That What It Grants Is Mere Illusion.

The Invocation Of Science, Of Its Ground Rules, Of The Exclusive Validity Of The Methods That Science Has Now Completely Become, Now Constitutes A Surveillance Authority Punishing Free, Uncoddled, Undisciplined Thought And Tolerating Nothing Of Mental Activity Other Than What Has Been Methodologically Sanctioned. Science And Scholarship, The Medium Of Autonomy, Has Degenerated Into An Instrument Of Heteronomy.

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.

The Expression If History In Things Is No Other Than That Of Past Torment.

There Is No Right Life In The Wrong One.

Death Is Imposed Only On Creatures, Not Their Creations, And Has Therefore Always Appeared In Art In A Broken Form: As Allegory.

The Power Of Works Of Art Still Continues To Be Secretly Nourished By Imitation... Kitsch

He Who Has Laughter On His Side Has No Need Of Proof.

The Law Of The Innermost Form Of The Essay Is Heresy

Culture Is Only True When Implicitly Critical, And The Mind Which Forgets This Revenges Itself In The Critics It Breeds. Criticism Is An Indispensable Element Of Culture.

Thinking No Longer Means Anymore Than Checking At Each Moment Whether One Can Indeed Think.

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

No Harm Comes To Man From Outside Alone: Dumbness Is The Objective Spirit.

The Sublime Is Only A Step Removed From The Ridiculous.

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.

Fear And Destructiveness Are The Major Emotional Sources Of Fascism, Eros Belongs Mainly To Democracy.

People At The Top Are Closing Ranks So Tightly That All Possibility Of Subjective Deviation Has Gone, And Difference Can Be Sought Only In The More Distinguished Cut Of An Evening Dress.

In The End, The Writer Is Not Even Allowed To Live In His Writing.

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.

Exuberant Health Is Always, As Such, Sickness Also.

What Can Oppose The Decline Of The West Is Not A Resurrected Culture But The Utopia That Is Silently Contained In The Image Of Its Decline.

Only Thought Which Does Violence To Itself Is Hard Enough To Shatter Myth.

The Culture Industry Perpetually Cheats Its Consumers Of What It Perpetually Promises. The Promissory Note Which, With Its Plots And Staging, It Draws On Pleasure Is Endlessly Prolonged; The Promise, Which Is Actually All The Spectacle Consists Of, Is Illusory: All It Actually Confirms Is That The Real Point Will Never Be Reached, That The Diner Must Be Satisfied With The Menu.

There's Not Much Need For Prophets Who Are In Synch With Their Society.

Dissonance Is The Truth About Harmony.

An Emancipated Society, On The Other Hand, Would Not Be A Unitary State, But The Realization Of Universality In The Reconciliation Of Differences.

Domination Delegates The Physical Violence On Which It Rests To The Dominated.

Physical Violence

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