In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

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.

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

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

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

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