Theodor Adorno

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

"Culture is a perennial argument about our past, present, and future."

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth."

"The culture industry not only adapts to the desires of the masses, but actively shapes and limits those desires."

"Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and establishing their sovereignty."

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

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."

"Art respects the masses by refusing to pander to them."

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

"Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic."

"Art is allowed to survive only insofar as it renounces the right to judge itself in terms of its efficacy."

"The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth."

"No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the sling to the megaphone."

"The exchange of commodities is the life element of capital."

"Authentic art must have something of the muteness of things."

"The whole is the false."

"Individuality is dying; conformation is winning."

"The authority of the body is a mystification which the enlightenment forgot to overcome."

"All reification is a forgetting."

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"The culture industry is the standardization and mass production of a predigested culture."

"Underneath the formula of reification lies the reversal of subject and object."

"Art is the vanguard of capitalist consumption."

"The smallest gesture is worthy of the smallest work of art."

"Truth is not a matter of correspondence between representation and reality."

"Even the term enlightenment, in its very universality, contains something problematic."

"The culture industry tends to make itself invisible."

"What does not appear must yield to what does."

"Tolerance toward evil is complicity with it."

"The more sophisticated the apparatus becomes, the more mystified it becomes."