All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.

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.

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.

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.