What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.