Quotes
The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere exceptions, should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its own untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself become an object of thought, instead of guiding it.
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.
The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian ule. Its organization also embraces those at war with it by co-ordinating their consciousness to its own.
Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.
Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.
People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.