Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

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.

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.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

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

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.