The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities — for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.