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.

Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.

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

This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.

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

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.