The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

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

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.

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

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

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.