Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
Theodor AdornoIn the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
Theodor AdornoThe good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
Theodor AdornoThey [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical clichรฉ, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
Theodor AdornoThe film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.
Theodor Adorno