The intellectual is called on the carpet... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.

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

However, if "free choice" means more than a small selection between pre-established necessities, and if the inclinations and impulses used in work are other than those preshaped by a repressive reality principle, then satisfaction in daily work is only a rare privilege.

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

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