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.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

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

People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.