Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.

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

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

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.