Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

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

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.