Quotes from Theodor Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.

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

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

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.

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.