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Theodor Adorno Quotes about Culture

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The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

Theodor Adorno
Culture, Conformity, Consciousness
Theodor W Adorno (2005). “The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture”, p.104, Routledge

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

Theodor Adorno
Triumph, Culture, Use
Theodor W Adorno (2005). “The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture”, p.12, Routledge

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Theodor Adorno
Culture, West, Utopia
Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.72, MIT Press

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

Theodor Adorno
Stupidity, Culture, Reactions
Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.46, Univ of California Press

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.

Theodor Adorno
Men, Differences, Culture
Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.79, Univ of California Press

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

Theodor Adorno
Hands, Differences, Culture
Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.79, Univ of California Press

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 Adorno
Order, Feelings, Culture

The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

Theodor Adorno
Joy, Culture, Conflict
Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.206, Verso

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 Adorno
Secret, Culture, World
Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.40, Verso

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.

Theodor Adorno
War, Ideas, Culture
Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (2003). “Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader”, p.46, Stanford University Press

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils.

Theodor Adorno
Sacrifice, Men, Culture
Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.72, MIT Press

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Theodor Adorno
People, Humanity, Culture
Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (2003). “Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader”, p.89, Stanford University Press

In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.

Theodor Adorno
Culture, Demand, Trouble
"Culture Industry Reconsidered". Book by Theodor Adorno, 1963.

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