“The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.” — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“Ever since Plato, bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objective antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“Fascism was not simply a conspiracy—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development.… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share
“Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.” — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share
“It is not so much that subjectivity is communicated or expressed by music as that in it, as in a theater, something objective is… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“Paranoia is a pathological possibility built-in to all conceptual thinking, the "dark side of cognition" and the typical symptom of the "half-educated."20 Anti-Semitism is a form of paranoid projection which has long been at the heart of Western culture, and it can be expected to flourish as social conditions swell the ranks of the disgruntled "half-educated." This argument is central… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share
“even there, where the rejection of the system is taken for granted and for that reason a lax and cunning conformism of its own… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
“The subjectivist approach to art simply fails to understand that the subjective experience of art in itself is meaningless, and that in order to… — Theodor W. Adorno Copy Share Image
