Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary. — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
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… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share
Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit. — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past. — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday. — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job,… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
“The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality. — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules… — Theodor Adorno Copy Share Image
