The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.

In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.

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

The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.