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

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

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.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

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

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.