A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.

— Theodor W. Adorno

Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.

— Theodor W. Adorno

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

— Theodor W. Adorno

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

— Theodor W. Adorno

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riffraff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?

— Theodor W. Adorno

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.

— Theodor W. Adorno

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.

— Theodor W. Adorno

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.

— Theodor W. Adorno

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

— Theodor W. Adorno

On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.

— Theodor W. Adorno