The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject.
Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Jazz is the false liquidation of art – instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.
Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid.
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
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.
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
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.
The idea that after this war life will continue ‘normally’ or even that culture might be ‘rebuilt’ – as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation – is idiotic.