Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

There is no right life in the wrong one.