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

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

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

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.