The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality.

What's important is promising something to the people, not actually keeping those promises. The people have always lived on hope alone.

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them

The man who is thus outside the confines of every value-combination, and has become the exclusive representative of an individual value, is metaphysically an outcast, for his autonomy presupposes the resolution and disintegration of all system into its individual elements; such a man is liberated from values and from style, and can be influenced only by the irrational.