Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life.

Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.

What appears is good; what is good appears.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.