A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
Theodor AdornoOnly a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
Theodor AdornoWhen I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
Theodor AdornoWhat has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.
Theodor AdornoThus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.
Theodor Adorno