Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen