Adorno, Theodor

"The most insidious form of control is making people believe they are free."

"Pleasure itself has been colonized by the administered world and rendered false."

"The past exerts a claim on us precisely because it was destroyed."

"The utopian moment in art is its refusal to reconcile itself with the present."

"The culture industry doesn't gently accustom men to what it will later force them to like, but sweeps away the last remnants of autonomy and spontaneity in favor of reified consciousness."

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass."

"Happiness is obsolete; we have instead the culture of the spectacle."

"Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."

"The need which might resist the system is already suppressed by the system itself."

"Art is the promise of the impossible."

"Nothing is left but to recognize that enlightenment itself is totalitarian."

"The human is indissolubly linked with domination."

"Only those thoughts which do not calculate are true thoughts."

"Reason becomes unreasonable when it denies the particular in favor of the universal."

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

"What is new is always bad; what is old is always good."

"The authenticity of art lies in its refusal to be reconciled with the world."

"Thought is the effort to think against oneself."

"The terrible gift of freedom lies in the burden of choosing."

"Art is the social antithesis of society."

"Reification is the acceptance of the social mediation as something natural."

"The exchange principle itself, along with all equalization, is a fact of violence."

"Without determinate negation, there is no progress."

"The culture industry is the elimination of all thought by the principle of equivalence."

"Life does not live."

"The only way out is through the dialectical negation of negation."

"Language is the scar of the unredeemable."

"Mimesis without the element of play becomes dead rationality."

"The impossible is what alone is true."