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

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

Intelligence is a moral category.

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.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

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.