Theodor W. Adorno

“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.”

“Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.”

“Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.”

“Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”

“An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.”

“In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.”

“Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.”

“Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.”

“The 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.”

“He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.”

“Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.”

“In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.”

“The whole is the false.”

“In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.”

“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.”

“The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.”

“Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.”

“Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.”

“Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.”

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.”