“Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

On high culture and popular culture, in a letter http://www.scribd.com/doc/11510904/Adorno-Letters-to-Walter-Benjamin to Walter Benjamin (18 March 1936)

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Theodor W. Adorno 90

German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for … 1903–1969

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 315
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“In the past three years we have burned our identity cards, torn up our ration books, halved the number of snoopers, decimated the number of forms and said good riddance to nearly two-thirds of the remaining wartime regulations. This is the march to freedom on which we are bound. And the pace must quicken as we go forward…Within the limits of law and social justice, our aim is freedom for every man and woman to live their own lives in their own way and not have their lives lived for them by an overweening State.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

Speech in Gloucester (10 July 1954), quoted in R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), p. 173.

“However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), Chapter One : The Fear of Poetry
Context: Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth!
How do we use feeling?
How do we use truth! However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.

“If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim — and if they used both halves of their brains — then they'd be libertarians. Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Revenge of the Cookie Monster".

“To do nothing by halves is the way of noble spirits.”

Christoph Martin Wieland book Oberon

Nichts halb zu thun ist edler Geister Art.
Oberon, Song 5, st. 30 http://www.archive.org/stream/oberon02187gut/7ober10.txt; translation from A. B. Faust (ed.) Oberon (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1940) p. 326.

“The vocabularies in the world add up, they do not overlap. Translation is something else.”

Thorsten J. Pattberg (1977) German philologist

Shengren (2011)

“For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.”

John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–1890) Irish-born poet and novelist

Quoted in Roche, James Jeffrey (1891). Life of John Boyle O'Reilly, together with his complete poems and speeches edited by Mrs John Boyle O'Reilly. New York. p 195.