The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.
Theodor AdornoEven the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
Theodor AdornoIn 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.
Theodor AdornoFreedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
Theodor AdornoThe only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.
Theodor Adorno