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

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

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.