Theodor Adorno

"Art is the social antithesis of society, not immediately deducible from the relations of production."

"What is rational in the exchange principle is at the same time irrational in the whole."

"Productive work and thinking are incompatible in a completely administered world."

"Society is not the ideal framework for art but its prison."

"The culture industry creates false consciousness."

"Progress is not continuous; it is discontinuous and contradictory."

"The concept of humaneness is not secured in the reified world."

"Art becomes true when it ceases to exist as art."

"Every art form betrays its own impossibility."

"The most intimate stratum of production in late capitalism is the reduction of thought itself to exchange value."

"Reason itself has been instrumental in its own domination."

"The exchange principle cannot be overcome without overcoming the exchange society itself."

"What impedes the development of the political content of art is that art has become the refuge of the damaged life."

"The culture industry's treatment of art is its destruction."

"Only by acknowledging the total damage can we begin to think against thought."

"Beethoven proves that authentic music breaks the spell of the culture industry."

"In the exchange society, everything including critique has become a commodity."

"The totally administered world has no outside."

"The culture industry manufactures ideology not merely by its products but by the nature of the apparatus itself."

"Art must think against thinking itself."

"Domination today is exercised not primarily through coercion but through the administration of consciousness."

"The jargon of authenticity conceals domination under the guise of freedom."

"What calls itself realism in capitalist societies is itself ideology."

"The culture industry produces stupidity as systematically as the heavy industries produce material commodities."

"Freedom means the freedom to negate."

"The price of reason is the suppression of reason in most human beings."

"Art that is successful within the system has already been neutralized by that very success."

"Truth appears today under the aspect of damaged life."

"The culture industry offers compensation and distraction, not enlightenment."

"Only what does not fit into the system can be critically meaningful."