All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

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

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.

... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.

Art... can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations.