Adorno, Theodor

"The culture industry not only adapts to the desires of the masses, but also molds and controls those desires."

"Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent system of administration."

"The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own."

"Thought is not immaculately preserved in the subject; rather, the subject is thoroughly mediated by the totally administered world."

"The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises."

"Art cannot change reality, but it can change consciousness."

"The need which might resist total inclusion is rebelling not just against the system but against life itself."

"Enlightenment is totalitarian."

"The completely administered world produces men which fit into it."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers."

"Art works are received and preserved through different processes than those defined by the exchange principle which governs the culture industry."

"What has been called art in the traditional sense must be distinguished from the commodified culture we consume."

"The more the concept of utility constricts, the more art must resist."

"Language is itself ideology."

"Authentic experience is no longer possible in a totally administered world."

"The culture industry is a system of standardized, homogenized cultural production."

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"Identity is only achieved by denying identity."

"The exchange principle appears as the substance of justice itself."

"Modern life is so thoroughly rationalized that authentic spontaneity becomes impossible."

"Art maintains a critical distance from the society that produces it."

"The administered world extends itself not just over society but over consciousness itself."

"Only by virtue of suffering is art able to gaze upon a world wholly damaged."

"Humanity is in a state of perversion when it abandons the pursuit of truth."

"The culture industry is the direct enemy of radical aesthetic experience."

"Knowledge which does not serve the exchange principle is increasingly eliminated."

"Negative dialectics is an attempt to break through the totality of administered thought."

"What is rational in a fundamentally irrational society cannot itself be entirely rational."

"The standardization of cultural production destroys the very concept of culture."