"The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, culture. It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing art to defend their collapsing culture."

Grosz, George on Culture
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"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning."

Barthes, Roland on Popular Culture
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"Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of quaint, and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive."

Frye, Northrop on Popular Culture
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"We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them."

Vizinczey, Stephen on Popular Culture
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"Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them."

Barthes, Roland on Class
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"Throughout recorded time... there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable."

Orwell, George on Class
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"There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence."

Adorno, Theodor W. on Ideology
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"Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane."

Adorno, Theodor W. on Arts and Artists
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"Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture."

Adorno, Theodor W. on Critics and Criticism
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