The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.

The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.

Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology; it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.

Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity."