The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.

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

Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence.

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

That which is cannot be true.

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.

While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies.