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.

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.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.